starvation

Etymology

starve + -ation

noun

  1. A condition of severe suffering due to a lack of nutrition.
  2. (figurative) Severe shortage of resources.
    Fuel starvation has several causes. 1963 February, “Diesel locomotive faults and their remedies”, in Modern Railways, page 99
    However, if the ASE application is paged out because of memory starvation, the entire process is blocked and no useful work can be done until the required pages are brought into memory. 2002, Allan N. Packer, Configuring and Tuning Databases on the Solaris Platform, page 362
  3. (computer science) A state where a process is perpetually denied necessary resources to process its work.
    Whenever multiple threads compete for a scarce resource, there is the danger of starvation, a situation in which the thread never gets the resource. 2004, Scott Oaks, Henry Wong, Java Threads, O'Reilly Media, page 138

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