What is "starvation" when used in the context of the Java threading model?

Created May 10, 2000

John Zukowski

Starvation is when the Java runtime (JVM) doesn't allocate time to a thread to execute. This may be due to a poor scheduling algorithm (like green Threads under Solaris, where a for loop from 1 to 1 million doing something CPU intensive wouldn't yield the CPU under Solaris but would under Windows), poor programming practice (not returning from the paint() method in an applet), or a hostile attack (like hitting a host with a denial of service attack where the CPU is busy outside the Java process).