Given so many disk-scheduling algorithms, how do we choose the best one? SIF is common and has a natural appeal because it increases performance over FCFS. SAM and C-SCAN perform better for systems that place a heavy load on the disk, because they are less likely to cause a starvation problem. For any particular list of requests, we can define an optimal order of retrieval, but the computation needed to find an optimal schedule may not justify the savings over SSTF or SCAN. With any scheduling algorithm, however, performance depends heavily on the number and types of requests. For instance, suppose that the queue usually has just one outstanding request. Then, all scheduling algorithms behave the same, because they have only one choice for where to move the disk head: They all behave like RCFS scheduling.