ITPEC FE Morning April 2019 Question 17
Which of the following is a method that performs data transfer between the main memory and a low-speed output device via a high-speed auxiliary storage device to increase the throughput of the entire system?
Explanation
Spooling — output is written first to fast auxiliary storage, and a slow device such as a printer is fed from there.
The program hands its output to the spool file on disk at disk speed and carries on processing. The slow output device then reads from the spool at its own pace, in parallel with other work, so the CPU is not held up and the throughput of the whole system rises.
Answer (c)
Why not others:
- •(a) Blocking — groups several logical records into one physical block to reduce the number of I/O operations
- •(b) Paging — moves fixed-size pages between real memory and auxiliary storage for virtual memory
- •(d) Swapping — moves a whole program between main memory and auxiliary storage to free memory
Key rule: Spooling decouples a fast producer (the CPU) from a slow output device by buffering on disk; the print queue is the everyday example.
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