Tiered Memory Management Beyond Hotness

Tiered memory systems often rely on access frequency (''hotness'') to guide data placement. However, hot data is not always performance-critical, limiting the effectiveness of hotness-based policies. We introduce amortized offcore latency (AOL), a novel metric that precisely captures the true performance impact of memory accesses by accounting for memory access latency and memory-level parallelism (MLP). Leveraging AOL, we present two powerful tiering mechanisms: SOAR, a profile-guided allocation policy that places objects based on their performance contribution, and ALTO, a lightweight page migration regulation policy to eliminate unnecessary migrations. SOAR and ALTO outperform four state-of-the-art tiering designs across a diverse set of workloads by up to 12.4×, while underperforming in a few cases by no more than 3%.