Adaptive page replacement based on memory reference behavior

Abstract

As disk performance continues to lag behind that of memory systems and processors, virtual memory management becomes increasingly important for overall system performance. In this paper we study the page reference behavior of a collection of memory-intensive applications, and propose a new virtual memory page replacement algorithm, SEQ. SEQ detects long sequences of page faults and applies most-recently-used replacement to those sequences. Simulations show that for a large class of applications, SEQ performs close to the optimal replacement algorithm, and significantly better than Least-Recently-Used (LRU). In addition, SEQ performs similarly to LRU for applications that do not exhibit sequential faulting.