undersubscribe

English

Etymology

under- +‎ subscribe

Verb

undersubscribe (third-person singular simple present undersubscribes, present participle undersubscribing, simple past and past participle undersubscribed)

1. To subscribe to an extent that is far less than is available or desirable.
   • 2013, Mario Levis, Silvio Vismara, Handbook of Research on IPOs, →ISBN, page 214:

     When only retail investors undersubscribe the offering, their demand is fully satisfied, but on average the IPO price is negatively revised (this revealing negative information collected on the market) and shares are not significantly underpriced.

   • 2015, Udo H. Staber, Norbert V. Schaefer, Basu Sharma, Business Networks: Prospects for Regional Development, →ISBN, page 74:

     In all, our conceptual discussion suggests that firms may tend to undersubscribe to private industrial services, opening the way for government intervention.

2. (computing) To have insufficient threads available in a multithreaded application so that all threads become blocked and performance suffers.
   • 2003, Fran Berman, Geoffrey Fox, Tony Hey, Grid Computing: Making the Global Infrastructure a Reality, →ISBN, page 311:

     This forces the agent to either oversubscribe itself by submitting jobs to multiple queues at once or undersubscribe itself by submitting jobs to potentially long queues.

   • 2009, Kaushik Datta, Auto-tuning Stencil Codes for Cache-based Multicore Platforms:

     First, the number of available hardware threads varies from platform to platform, so the ideal number of threads on one machine may undersubscribe or oversubscribe the threads on a different machine.

3. (computing) To employ more switch ports than necessary so that high-priority traffic is sure to be handled right away.
   • 2004, Nam-Kee Tan, MPLS for Metropolitan Area Networks, →ISBN, page 384:

     In this way, MSPs can have the flexibility to oversubscribe lower-priority classes or even undersubscribe higher-priority traffic to meet tight QoS/SLA requirements.