Abstract

The Multi-threaded Paging problem (MTP) generalizes Paging to the case where there are many threads of requests. This models situations in which the requests come from more than one independent source. At each step it is necessary to decide which request to serve, and also (as in normal Paging) which page of fast memory to remove on a page fault. In MTP the input sequences are allowed to be either finite or infinite, and the problem is considered both with and without a fairness constraint on the way in which the individual requests are served. In this paper we propose alternative definitions of competitiveness for deterministic on-line algorithms for the infinite versions of MTP. The new definitions intend to compare the algorithms' steady-state performances on infinite sequences. Although a priori the alternative definitions seem different, we find that they are essentially equivalent. This suggests that the somehow negative results obtained when MTP was introduced, may be consider...

Citations