What is starvation, and why is it undesirable in a concurrent program?
Starvation is a problem in concurrent systems in which a process (or a thread) cannot gain access to the necessary resources to proceed with its execution, and therefore, cannot make any progress.
What are the underlying causes of starvation? What are the common superficial causes of starvation that can manifest from the underlying cause?
Most of the time, a poorly coordinated set of scheduling instructions is the main cause of starvation. Some high-level causes for starvation might include the following:
- Processes (or threads) with high priorities dominate the execution flow in the CPU, and thus, low-priority processes (or threads) are not given the opportunity to execute their own instructions.
- Processes (or threads) with high priorities dominate the usage of non-shareable resources, and thus...
