Job (software)

In computing a job (or process) is a term used to refer to a single instance of a program. The term is mostly used on multitasking systems. These are operating systems that are able to process many tasks 'concurrently'; however, this is normally achieved through the illusion of doing a little bit of job A, then a bit of job B, then a bit of job C, but done so quickly that the user sees them as happening at the same time. The term 'time slice' is used for the amount of time that a job gets run for, and the process of going through all the jobs, running each of them for a time slice, is known as a processing cycle. So, job A might get a timeslice of so many milliseconds, and then, whether it's finished or not, it will be job B's turn, and the computer will pause execution of job A, until the other jobs have had their turn, and job A is resumed at where it left off. The software responsible for managing this is known as a job scheduler.Because such systems tend to have many jobs active at any one time, they provide 'job' management facilities that allow the user to stop/pause/restart jobs, and to set priorities on jobs (so that job A might get more 'timeslices' per cycle than other jobs).