Patent ID: 8826291

Claim:
A processing system comprising: a process request queue that corresponds to a process group and additionally stores an arriving process request addressed to the process group; at least one processor that belongs to the process group, and that, upon being enabled to receive a new process request, retrieves a process request from the process request queue, and processes the retrieved process request; a monitoring unit that monitors a process load of the process group, and that, upon determining through monitoring that the process load of the process group becomes lower than a predetermined contraction threshold value, issues a group contraction instruction to the process group, wherein if the group contraction instruction has been issued, processors of a predetermined number within the process group become suspension targets, and wherein the processor as the suspension target stops retrieving a new process request from the process request queue of the process group, stops operating upon completing the processing of all the retrieved process requests, and is then excluded from the process group; and further comprising a contraction instruction queue associated with the process group, wherein the monitoring unit adds the group contraction instruction to be issued to the process group to the contraction instruction queue associated with the process group, and wherein only if the process load is lower than a suspension target threshold value predetermined for the process load, each processor performs a retrieval operation to retrieve the group contraction instruction from the contraction instruction queue, and then becomes the suspension target if the group contraction instruction has been retrieved through the retrieval operation.