Consider a computer system that runs 5,000 jobs per month and has no deadlock-prevention or deadlock-avoidance scheme. Deadlocks occur about twice per month, and the operator must terminate and re run about ten jobs per deadlock. Each job is worth about two dollars (in CPU time), and the jobs terminated tend to be about half done when they are aborted.
A systems programmer has estimated that a deadlock-avoidance algorithm (like the banker’s algorithm) could be installed in the system
with an increase of about 10 percent in the average execution time per job. Since the machine currently has 30 percent idle time, all 5,000 jobs per month could still be run, although turnaround time would increase by about 20 percent on average.
a. What are the arguments for installing the deadlock-avoidance algorithm ?
b. What are the arguments against installing the deadlock-avoidance algorithm?
