Windows® Internals, Sixth Edition, Part 1

Processor Share-Based Scheduling

In the previous section, the standard thread-based scheduling implementation of Windows was described, which has served general user and server scenarios reliably since its appearance in the first Windows NT release (with scalability improvements done throughout each release). However, because thread-based scheduling attempts to fairly share the processor or processors only among competing threads of same priority, it does not take into account higher-level requirements such as the distribution of threads to users and the potential for certain users to benefit from more overall CPU time at the expense of other users. This kind of behavior, as it turns out, is highly sought after in terminal-services environments, ...