Hipec: A system for application-customized virtual-memory caching management

Abstract

Conventional operating systems employ a kernel-controlled caching strategy that cannot properly serve all access-pattern types used by applications. When running under these systems, many memory-intensive applications with mis-matching access patterns cause excessive page faults and page replacements that reduce the application's performance. This paper presents the hipec system, which allows applications to have their own caching strategies for managing page frames with negligible overhead. Since application designers know the access patterns of their applications, the specific caching strategies can be tuned to meet the needs of each application. Empirical results show that the hipec system significantly improves application performance and system throughput. (C) 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.