Abstract

While many applications incur few page faults, some scientific and database applications perform poorly when running on top of a traditional virtual memory implementation. To help address this problem, several systems have been built to allow each program the flexibility to use its own application-specific page replacement policy, in place of the generic policy provided by the operating system. This has the potential to improve performance for the class of applications limited by virtual memory behavior; however, to realize this performance gain, application developers must re-implement much of the virtual memory system, a non-trivial programming task. Our goal is to make it easy for programmers to develop new application-specific page replacement policies. To do this, we have implemented (i) an extensible object-oriented user-level virtual memory system and (ii) a graphical performance monitor for virtual memory behavior. Together, these help the user to identify problems with an appl...

Citations