What are the advantages and disadvantages of timesharing features?
Answers
Advantages of time sharing operating systems:
In time sharing systems all the tasks are given specific time and task switching time is very less so applications don’t get interrupted by it. Many applications can run at the same time. You can also use time sharing in batch systems if appropriate which increases performance.
Time sharing systems is better way to run a business having lot of tasks to be done and no task get interrupted by the system. Each task and each user get its time. The tasks which are near to end get more attention so that new tasks can get time.
You may have heard about threads in programming language. Threads also work on time sharing. Have you heard about multi-threading or multi-tasking? It is using time sharing to switch jobs/tasks. Suppose you are using MS word or MS excel. Now in these applications many small threads or tasks are running like spelling checking and grammatical checking in MS word. So time sharing operating systems have to give time to these application individual tasks and other applications also, so that all system behave correctly.
Disadvantages of time sharing operating systems:
The big disadvantages of time sharing systems is that it consumes much resources so it need special operating systems. Switching between tasks becomes sometimes sophisticated as there are lot of users and applications running which may hang up the system. So the time sharing systems should have high specifications of hardware.