http://peertopatent.org/patent/20080098395/activity In one embodiment, jobs requiring short processing time are given preference over jobs requiring long processing time by processing to completion all jobs for the first N seconds of the job. Jobs requiring longer than N seconds to complete are given a lower priority than a newly arriving job can and continue being processed, but are subject to reduction in resources by new jobs as each new job arrives. en-us System and method of expediting certain jobs in a computer processing system Some of the job schedulers in OS/360 and Unix had features much like this in the late 60s/early 70s. OS/360 JCL had/has job classes which allocate the processing of batch jobs based on anticipated system load. Unix had/has a scheduling algorithm in which a job's priority decreases as it runs. There, the only difference is that Unix's "N" is a major clock-tick. Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:42:13 -0700 http://peertopatent.org/patent/20080098395/discussion