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doi:10.1016/j.peva.2004.10.002 
Copyright © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Token-ordered LRU: an effective page replacement policy and its implementation in Linux systems
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Available online 17 November 2004.
Abstract
Most computer systems use a global page replacement policy based on the LRU principle to approximately select a Least Recently Used page for a replacement in the entire user memory space. During execution interactions, a memory page can be marked as LRU even when its program is conducting page faults. We define the LRU pages under such a condition as false LRU pages because these LRU pages are not produced by program memory reference delays, which is inconsistent with the LRU principle. False LRU pages can significantly increase page faults, even cause system thrashing. This poses a more serious risk in a large parallel systems with distributed memories because of the existence of coordination among processes running on individual node. In the case, the process thrashing in a single node or a small number of nodes could severely affect other nodes running coordinating processes, even crash the whole system. In this paper, we focus on how to improve the page replacement algorithm running on one node.
After a careful study on characterizing the memory usage and the thrashing behaviors in the multi-programming system using LRU replacement. we propose an LRU replacement alternative, called token-ordered LRU, to eliminate or reduce the unnecessary page faults by effectively ordering and scheduling memory space allocations. Compared with traditional thrashing protection mechanisms such as load control, our policy allows more processes to keep running to support synchronous distributed process computing. We have implemented the token-ordered LRU algorithm in a Linux kernel to show its effectiveness.
Keywords: Process thrashing; Global LRU replacement; Load control; Performance evaluation
Article Outline
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Backgrounds of thrashing protections
- 2.1. Local page replacement
- 2.2. Working set models
- 2.3. Load controls
- 2.4. Why is a lightweight thrashing prevention mechanism desired?
- 3. Experimental environment
- 4. Memory performance of different types of program interactions
- 4.1. Performance metrics
- 4.2. Memory performance of program interactions
- 4.3. How are thrashings triggered?
- 5. Design and implementations of the token-ordered LRU
- 5.1. LRU page replacement in Linux
- 5.2. How is the token-ordered LRU implemented in Linux?
- 5.3. Objectively monitoring the usage of the token
- 5.4. A close look at the token-ordered LRU in program interactions
- 6. Performance of the token-ordered LRU
- 7. Other related work
- 8. Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- References
- Vitae
