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5th Annual Linux Showcase & Conference — Abstract
Pp. 143-151 of the Proceedings
Adaptive Page Replacement to Protect Thrashing in Linux
Song Jiang and Xiaodong Zhang, Department of Computer Science, College of William and Mary
Abstract
Analyzing the variations of page replacement implementations in recent
Linux kernel versions of 2.0, 2.2, and 2.4, we compare their
abilities to deal with system thrashing. We show that although the
page implementation in Kernel 2.2 is relatively effective to protect
thrashing among the three versions, none of them have adaptive ability,
and thus the protection is limited.
By running several groups of memory-intensive application
programs on Kernel 2.2, we observe serious thrashing when
memory shortage attains a certain level.
We propose and implement a thrashing protection patch in Linux kernels,
which makes replacement policy responsively resolve excessive memory
paging by temporarily helping one of the active processes quickly build up its working
set. Consequently, thrashing could be eliminated at the level of
page replacement, so that load controls at a higher level, such as
process suspensions/swapping can be avoided or delayed until
it is truly necessary. Our experiments show that our patch can
significantly reduce page faults and the execution time of each
individual thrashing
process for several groups of interacting programs. We also show that
our method introduces little additional overhead to program executions,
and its implementation in Linux (or Unix) system is straightforward.
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