Seung Hoon Lee, Jong Woo Lee, Seong Je Cho

The KIPS Transactions:PartA, Vol. 8, No. 4, pp. 469-478, Dec. 2001
10.3745/KIPSTA.2001.8.4.469,   PDF Download:

Abstract

In the virtual memory system, page replacement policy exerts a great influence on the performance of demand paging. There are LRU(Least Recently Used) and LFU (Least Frequently Used) as the typical replacement policies. The LRU policy performs effectively in many cases and adapts well to the changing workloads compared to other policies. It however cannot distinguish well between frequently and infrequently referenced pages. The LFU policy requires that the page with the smallest reference count be replaced. Though it considers all the references in the past, it cannot discriminate between references that occurred far back in the past and the more recent ones. Thus, it cannot adapt well to the changing workload. In this paper, we first analyze memory reference patterns of eight applications. The patterns show that the recently referenced pages or the frequently referenced pages are accessed continuously as the case may be. So it is rather hard to optimize page replacement scheme by using just one of the LRU or LFU policy. This paper makes an attempt to combine the advantages of the two policies and proposes a new page replacement policy. In the proposed policy, paging list is divided into two lists (LRU and LFU lists). By keeping the two lists in recency and reference frequency order respectively, we try to restrain the highly referenced pages in the past from being replaced by the LRU policy. Results from trace-driven simulations show that there exists points on the spectrum at which the proposed policy performs better than the previously known policies for the workloads we considered. Especially, we can see that our policy outperforms the existing ones in such applications that have reference patterns of re-accessing the frequently referenced pages in the past after some time.

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