We consider the classical problem of online preemptive job scheduling on uniprocessor and multiprocessor machines. For a given job, we measure the quality of service provided by an algorithm by the stretch of the job, which is defined as the ratio of the amount of time that the job spends in the system to the processing time of the job. For a given sequence of jobs, we measure the performance of an algorithm by the average stretch achieved by the algorithm over all the jobs in the sequence.
We first prove that no on-line algorithm can achieve a competitive ratio that is smaller than 1.03. The main contribution of this paper is to show that the shortest remaining processing time algorithm (SRPT) is O(1)-competitive with respect to average stretch for both uniprocessors as well as multiprocessors. For uniprocessors, we prove that SRPT is 2-competitive. We also establish an essentially matching lower bound on the competitve ratio of SRPT on uniprocessors. For multiprocessors, we show that the competitive ratio of SRPT is at most 14.
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