Context Switch OS : How much and How frequent Context Switching is recommended for OS?

Question

I was asked to answer a question about the OS context switch and I cannot find the answer in my textbook.

How much and How frequent Context Switching is recommended for OS?

Answer 1

There is no answer in yout textbook because no answer can be supplied given the scant info in your question. For preemptive multitaskers such as Windows or Linux, I guess an answer would be 'as frequently as required by the scheduling/dispatching algorithms and the interrupts that drive them'.

Answer 2

Short and generic answer: As few as possible (since context switches are pure overhead, consuming CPU time, without getting any actual work done) and as many as necessary (to satisfy the user's/application's expectations regarding parallelism, responsiveness, latency, etc.)