Question

Which of the following observations and techniques are generally indicative of improvements in run-time performance? Pick one of the choices o Context switching O Thrashing O Dynamically allocating and releasing objects O Using virtual memory O Using critical sections O None of the above

Answer 1

Correct Answer: Using critical sections

Explanation:

Context switching is the process by which the state of the currently executing process is saved and CPU is allocated to another process. This is the overhead on the system.

Thrashing is a situation in which the operating system spends more time in swapping and this will decrease the performance of the system.

Dynamically allocating and releasing objects save the memory but take extra time in doing this process.

The virtual memory is the secondary memory that is treated as the main memory when a program size is greater than the main memory size.

The critical section is the area where shared variable is used and we use a semaphore to solve the critical section problem.

A semaphore is a simple and special variable and it solves the critical section problem that can be accessed by only two system calls signal() and wait() which are atomic in nature.

By using the critical section, we increase the performance of the system.

So, the second last option is correct.