Priority inheritance in soft real-time databases

Due to resource sharing among tasks, priority inversion can occur during priority-driven preemptive scheduling. In this work, we investigate solutions to the priority inversion problem in a soft real-time database environment where two-phhse locking is employed for concurrency control. We examine two basic schemes for addressing the priority inversion problem, one based on priority inheritance and the other based on priority abort. We also study a new scheme, called conditional priority inheritance, which attempts to capitalize on the advantages of each of the two basic schemes. In contrast with previous results obtained in real-time operating systems, our performance studies, conducted on an actual real-time database testbed, indicate that the basic priority inheritance protocol is inappropriate for solving the priority inversion problem in real-time database systems. We identify the reasons for this performance. We also show that the conditional priority inheritance scheme and the priority abort scheme perform well for a wide range of system workloads.This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant IRI-8908693 and by the U.S. Office of Naval Research under Grant N00014-85-K0398.A previous version of this paper appeared in Real-Time Systems Symposium, Dec. 1991.