What is starvation in thread management?

Starvation is a situation in multithreaded or concurrent programming where one or more threads do not get access to necessary resources because other threads are constantly given priority.

For example, if a system has thread priorities and high-priority threads constantly occupy the processor, low-priority threads may 'starve' — not execute for a long time.

This leads to performance and correctness issues, especially if the starving thread is responsible for an important task.

To prevent starvation, various scheduling strategies are used, such as:

• fair scheduling
• priority inheritance
• limiting execution time of high-priority threads

Thus, starvation is a problem where a thread does not receive resources due to scheduling policies or competition.