On adequate performance measures for paging

Memory management is a fundamental problem in computer architecture and operating systems. We consider a two-level memory system with fast, but small cache and slow, but large main memory. The underlying theoretical problem is known as the paging problem. A sequence of requests to pages has to be served by making each requested page available in the cache. A paging strategy replaces pages in the cache with requested ones. The aim is to minimize the number of page faults that occur whenever a requested page is not in the cache. Experience shows that the Least-Recently-Used (LRU) paging strategy usually achieves a factor around 2 to 3 compared to the optimum number of faults. This contrasts the theoretical worst case, in which this factor can be as large as the cache size k. One difficulty in analyzing the paging problem was the lack of an appropriate lower bound for the minimum number of page faults. We address this issue and propose a general lower bound which provides insight into th...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: STOC
• Authors: Konstantinos Panagiotou, Alexander Souza
• Keywords: Algorithms, Cache, Page, Paging Problem, STOC 2006