Producer-Consumer Simulation

This project implements a simulation of a producer-multiple consumer problem, where multiple consumers request random lines from a file. The system consists of a parent process and multiple child processes. The parent process spawns K_children number of child processes, where K_children is provided by the user. The segments of the file are sequentially stored in shared memory by the parent process. The parent process waits for all child processes to finish processing the current segment before proceeding to the next segment.

Each child process randomly selects a line from a segment and waits for that segment to be stored in shared memory before retrieving it. Each child process can make up to M_requests requests. The probability of requesting a line from a new segment is 0.3, while the probability of requesting a line from the previously requested segment is 0.7. The child processes log their requests, submission time, response time, and acquired lines in individual files.

Usage

Use the Makefile to compile, run and clean using the following commands:

$ make 
$ make run
$ make clean

Note: make run, does the following: ./main $(INPUT)/many_strings.txt 100 10 10

To customize the program's arguments, modify the ARG variable in the Makefile with your desired values. The available command-line arguments are:

$ ./main <file.txt> <N_lines> <K_children> <M_requests>

• N_lines: Number of lines in segment
• K_children: Number of children
• M_requests: Maximum number of child requests

⚠️ Please note that this project has been tested and validated on Linux systems.