Queuing discipline (FIFO + Round Robin)
Submitted by srajeshvirtusa on Thu, 18/01/2007 - 18:46.
performance testing | taxonomy
[textile]
After long stint at the client location i came back to india last week. Since i had been away for long period i wanted to visit all my near and dear. I drove to my parents place (vizag in india).i wanted my entire family to go on a small vacation my father as usual wanted to travel by train rather than air so we both visted the nearest railway reservation counters in the city.
To my surprise lot of things changed since i visited last the same place some 2 years ago. Just before heading to the reservation centre my father explained to me how the entire process of purchasing/reserving train tickets has completely changed, he quipped "they have used token system".
I said to myself yes india is improving slowly not too bad!!!. But to my surprise when i entered the place i still saw people standing then i observed that token which have been issued is being displayed on a 14 inch TV (nothing wrong about it, india is still a developing country) but i was wondering what a usability mismatch how can a room which can accomodate 1000 people have a 14 inch TV for display of the token.
To give you some background: 2 years back when ever i had to reserve/purchse my tickets i used to first visit all the counters, estimate the queue length and then get into a queue which would result in shortest Queue wait time. More often than not i succeed to get out of the counter faster than others. When i fail i always think why don't they apply a FIFO queuing discipline which will provide a fair policy.
To my surprise today after 2 years they have implemented but execution was completely out of the mark. To obtain a token we had a FIFO and to make the reservation a person was manually operating by performing a round- robin token assignement to different service centres. This works but i will not call it a pure FIFO (nothing technical). For instance, the person who is allocating the work items (basically people who want to reserve a ticket; the work items are being assigned in chunks of 2/3 to particular queue), there is every chance that a work item on a particular queue would be serviced faster than other work items who had a lower token number, as the service times at different service centres vary drastically ( some people can have just
one person travelling, the others can have a maixmum of 6 in one ticket; one reason for varying service time).
Once i complete my travel i am planning to write a suggestion letter to railways to change the current system and use pure FIFO rather than a combination of FIFO+ Round Robin
After long stint at the client location i came back to india last week. Since i had been away for long period i wanted to visit all my near and dear. I drove to my parents place (vizag in india).i wanted my entire family to go on a small vacation my father as usual wanted to travel by train rather than air so we both visted the nearest railway reservation counters in the city.
To my surprise lot of things changed since i visited last the same place some 2 years ago. Just before heading to the reservation centre my father explained to me how the entire process of purchasing/reserving train tickets has completely changed, he quipped "they have used token system".
I said to myself yes india is improving slowly not too bad!!!. But to my surprise when i entered the place i still saw people standing then i observed that token which have been issued is being displayed on a 14 inch TV (nothing wrong about it, india is still a developing country) but i was wondering what a usability mismatch how can a room which can accomodate 1000 people have a 14 inch TV for display of the token.
To give you some background: 2 years back when ever i had to reserve/purchse my tickets i used to first visit all the counters, estimate the queue length and then get into a queue which would result in shortest Queue wait time. More often than not i succeed to get out of the counter faster than others. When i fail i always think why don't they apply a FIFO queuing discipline which will provide a fair policy.
To my surprise today after 2 years they have implemented but execution was completely out of the mark. To obtain a token we had a FIFO and to make the reservation a person was manually operating by performing a round- robin token assignement to different service centres. This works but i will not call it a pure FIFO (nothing technical). For instance, the person who is allocating the work items (basically people who want to reserve a ticket; the work items are being assigned in chunks of 2/3 to particular queue), there is every chance that a work item on a particular queue would be serviced faster than other work items who had a lower token number, as the service times at different service centres vary drastically ( some people can have just
one person travelling, the others can have a maixmum of 6 in one ticket; one reason for varying service time).
Once i complete my travel i am planning to write a suggestion letter to railways to change the current system and use pure FIFO rather than a combination of FIFO+ Round Robin