The Foreground–Background queue: A survey

Computer systems researchers have begun to apply the Foreground–Background (FB) scheduling discipline to a variety of applications, and as a result, there has been a resurgence in theoretical research studying FB. In this paper, we bring together results from both of these research streams to provide a survey of state-of-the-art theoretical results characterizing the performance of FB. Our emphasis throughout is on the impact of these results on computer systems.