What is starvation?

Question

In multitasking systems, some abnormal conditions prevent progress of executing processes or threads. I\'ll refer to both processes and threads simply as \"processes\". Two

Answer 1

Starvation is simply when a process or service is not being serve, even when there is no deadlock on the system.

This is an example I just made up just for clarification purposes.

Imagine an algorithm that control computers access to a WAN or something like that. This algorithm could have a policy that says "Provide priority access to those computers that will use less bandwidth.", that will seem like a proper policy, but then what happens when a single computer wants to access the network for an ftp upload that will send several GB somewhere. With this policy alone, that computer will starve since the algorithm will never select that computer, since there will be always other computers requesting smaller bandwidth usage.

That is called starvation.