An approximate analysis of sojourn times in the M/G/1 queue with round-robin service discipline

In most time-shared computer systems a program is processed by the central processing unit for, at most, a fixed period of time called a time slice, or quantum. If the program requires more processing after it has received its quantum, it is placed at the end of a run queue. This procedure is repeated until the program has finished executing. To the user who submitted the program the two most important performance measures of such a system are the mean and variance of the program's total elapsed time of execution. This total elapsed time is often referred to as the “response time”. In this paper we investigate the effect of the quantum size on the mean and variance of the response time.