Scheduler thrashing. This can
happen under Unix when you have a number of processes that are
waiting on a single event. When that event (a connection to the web
server, say) happens, every process which could possibly handle the
event is awakened. In the end, only one of those processes will
actually be able to do the work, but, in the meantime, all the
others wake up and contend for CPU time before being put back to
sleep. Thus the system thrashes briefly while a herd of processes
thunders through. If this starts to happen many times per second,
the performance impact can be significant.
brute force adj.
Describes a primitive programming style
one in which the programmer relies on the computer's processing
power instead of using his or her own intelligence to simplify the
problem, often ignoring problems of scale and applying naive
methods suited to small problems directly to large ones....