Work Stealing

Work Stealing — A scheduling strategy in which idle workers take tasks from the queues of busy workers to improve utilization and load balance.

Concurrency Context

Work-stealing schedulers typically give each worker a local deque. The owner consumes tasks from one end while an idle worker steals from the other, combining locality for the common path with dynamic load balancing for uneven fork-join workloads.

Scheduling Boundary

Very small tasks can make scheduling overhead dominant, while long blocking operations can reduce the assumptions under which stealing performs well. Work stealing is therefore not universally superior to a fixed work queue or another scheduling policy.

Related Concurrency Concepts

• Thread Pool
• Structured Concurrency
• Parallelism
• Task Granularity