7.8 Time Slicing

Time slicing is the most common technique to implement time sharing in operating systems. To implement time sharing a timer can be used to interrupt every very short time to switch the control of the CPU between the different users. So time slice is the amount of time allowed to each user to execute before the next user gets control of the CPU, in time sharing process. Time slices are in milliseconds. The operating system is invoked at the end of each time slice to perform other tasks. With a single-user system, a time-slice is the amount of processing time each program gets.