HiPEC: High Performance External Virtual Memory Caching

Traditional operating systems use a fixed LRU-like page replacement policy and centralized frame pool that cannot properly serve all types of memory access patterns of various applications. As a result, many memory-intensive applications, such as databases, multimedia applications and scientific simulators, induce excessive page faults and page replacement when running on top of existing operating systems.

This paper presents a High Performance External virtual memory Caching mechanism (HiPEC) to provide applications with their own specific page replacement management. The user specific policy, programmed in the HiPEC command set, is stored in user address space. When a page fault occurs, the kernel fetches and interprets the corresponding policy commands to perform the user-specific page replacement management. Experimental results show that HiPEC induces little overhead and can significantly improve performance for memory-intensive applications.