Resource contention in the context of Shared resource

A computer system resource is any hardware or software aspect of limited availability that is accessible to a computer system. Like any resource, computer system resources can be exhausted, and issues arise due to scarcity.

Resource management, a key aspect of designing hardware and software, includes preventing resource leaks (not releasing a resource done with it) and handling resource contention (when multiple processes want to access the same resource). Computing resources are used in cloud computing to provide services through networks.

Instructions per second (IPS) is a measure of a computer's processor speed. For complex instruction set computers (CISCs), different instructions take different amounts of time, so the value measured depends on the instruction mix; even for comparing processors in the same family the IPS measurement can be problematic. Many reported IPS values have represented "peak" execution rates on artificial instruction sequences with few branches and no cache contention, whereas realistic workloads typically lead to significantly lower IPS values. Memory hierarchy also greatly affects processor performance, an issue barely considered in IPS calculations. Because of these problems, synthetic benchmarks such as Dhrystone are now generally used to estimate computer performance in commonly used applications, and raw IPS has fallen into disuse.

The term is commonly used in association with a metric prefix (k, M, G, T, P, or E) to form kilo instructions per second (kIPS), mega instructions per second (MIPS), giga instructions per second (GIPS) and so on. Formerly TIPS was used occasionally for "thousand IPS".

A file system provides a data storage service that allows applications to share mass storage. Without a file system, applications could access the storage in incompatible ways that lead to resource contention, data corruption and data loss.