Page replacement in distributed virtual memory systems

Abstract

The authors introduce three page replacement, and page out policies, in distributed virtual memory systems. Two of the replacement policies, the least recently brought and the global recently used or brought, are adapted versions of the least recently used policy, which is well known in conventional virtual memory systems. Trace driven simulation was used to evaluate the performance of the replacement policies and the RR (round robin), LAN (least active neighbor), and LLN (least loaded neighbor) page out policies. The results suggest that when the cost of internode faults is considerably higher than local memory access, global and remote policies are superior to the local one. When the cost of bringing a page from the immediate neighbor is considerably low compared to the cost of accessing the local memory, the local policy performs as well as the global and the remote. Among the page out policies, round robin is the least efficient. LLN generates lower cost than LAN when the size of the local memory is relatively large. Under high memory contention, LAN shows better performance.<>