Foreword

I would like to introduce this issue by telling a story. Sometime back in 1997, I wrote a paper on a new idea for improving the response times of http requests at a Web server. The idea was to schedule the HTTP requests so as to favor requests for small files, in accordance with the well-known scheduling policy Shortest Remaining Processing Time (SRPT). The paper was rejected, for many reasons, but the review that stuck in my mind was the one that said, "Why is this person writing about scheduling? Scheduling is dead." According to this reviewer, everything that would ever be known about scheduling was already described in the beautiful Theory of Scheduling book, written in 1967, by Conway, Maxwell, and Miller.