UNIT IV (Third Part – 3/3)
Memory Management
(Page Replacement)
Page Replacement
• When a process generates a page fault, the memory
manager must locate referenced page in secondary
storage, load it into page frame in main memory and
update corresponding page table entry
• Prevent over-allocation of memory by modifying
page-fault service routine to include page
replacement.
• Modified (dirty) bit
– Set to 1 if page has been modified; 0 otherwise
– Help systems quickly determine which pages have been
modified
Page Replacement
• Optimal page replacement strategy (OPT or MIN)
– Obtains optimal performance, replaces the page that
will not be referenced again until furthest into the
future
• A page-replacement strategy is characterized by
– Heuristic it uses to select a page for replacement
– The overhead it incurs
Page Replacement
Basic Page Replacement
• Find the location of the desired page on
disk
• Find a free frame:
- If there is a free frame, use it
- If there is no free frame, use a page
replacement algorithm to select a victim
frame
• Bring the desired page into the (newly) free
frame; update the page and frame tables
Existing page replacement
algorithms
• First-In-First-Out (FIFO) Algorithm
• Optimal Algorithm
• Least Recently Used (LRU) Algorithm
• LRU Approximation Algorithms
o Second chance algorithm
• Counting Algorithms
First-In-First-Out (FIFO)
Algorithm
• When a page must be replaced the oldest
page is chosen
• It maintains a FIFO queue to hold all pages
in memory
• Likely to replace heavily used pages
• Can be implemented with relatively low
overhead
• Impractical for most systems
First-In-First-Out (FIFO)
Algorithm
FIFO Anomaly
• Belady’s (or FIFO) Anomoly
– Certain page reference patterns actually cause
more page faults when number of page frames
allocated to a process is increased
FIFO Anomaly
Optimal Algorithm
• Replace page that will not be used for
longest period of time
• This algorithm guarantees the lowest
possible page fault rate for a fixed number
of frames.
Least Recently Used (LRU)
Algorithm
• LRU page replacement
– Exploits temporal locality by replacing the page that
has spent the longest time in memory without being
referenced
– Can provide better performance than FIFO
– Increased system overhead
– LRU can perform poorly if the least-recently used page
is the next page to be referenced by a program that is
iterating inside a loop that references several pages
Least Recently Used (LRU)
Algorithm
LRU Approximation Algorithms
- Second chance algorithm
• When a page has been selected, it will inspect the
reference bit
• If it is 0 not referenced, the page is replaced.
• If it is 1 (referenced) the page is given a second
chance and move on to select the next FIFO page
• When a page gets a second chance, its reference
bit is cleared and its arrival time is reset to the
current time.
LRU Approximation Algorithms
- Second chance algorithm
Counting Algorithms
• Keep a counter of the number of references
that have been made to each page
• LFU Algorithm: replaces page with
smallest count
• MFU Algorithm: based on the argument that
the page with the smallest count was
probably just brought in and has yet to be
used
Working Set Model
• For a program to run efficiently
– The system must maintain that program’s
favored subset of pages in main memory
• Otherwise
– The system might experience excessive paging
activity causing low processor utilization called
thrashing as the program repeatedly requests
pages from secondary storage
Working Set Model
• The process’s working set of pages, W(t, w), is the set
of pages referenced by the process during the process-
time interval t – w to t.
• The size of the process’s working set increases
asymptotically to the process’s program size as its
working set window increases
• As a process transitions between working sets, the
system temporarily maintains in memory pages that
are no longer in the process’s current working set
– Goal of working set memory management is to reduce this
misallocation
Thrashing
• The high paging activity is called thrashing. A
process is thrashing if it is spending more time in
paging than executing.
• If a process does not have “enough” pages, the
page-fault rate is very high. This leads to
– low CPU utilization
– operating system thinks that it needs to increase the
degree of multiprogramming
– another process added to the system
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