An interactive process communicates with the user by receiving commands or data from the keyboard or a pointing device and responding by generating output to an output device. (monitor, printer, etc)
A time quantum, Q, is a small amount of time (typically 10 to 100 milliseconds) during which a process is allowed to use the CPU.
The round-robin (RR) algorithm uses a single (circular) queue of processes. The priority is determined solely by a process’s position within the queue. Once the queue has completed, the pointer moves back to the beginning of the queue, unless there is a direct circular linked list involved.
If Q is large, then the system begins to mimic a FIFO type of system. However, they will lose out on the ability to be “interactive” since there may be unacceptable lag time between the process of returning to the process.
Multilevel (ML) scheduling maintains a separate queue of processes at each priority level. Within each level, processes are scheduled using RR. Depending upon the system, higher level queues may starve lower level queues, or may run for a longer period of time (Q) than lower level processes.
Scheduling of Interactive Processes was originally found on Access 2 Learn
