An analysis of prepaging

Prepaging is advocated as a technique to reduce the excessive page traffic due to the changes in the phases of execution of a program. Common prepaging techniques are surveyed. It is advocated that the phase transition behavior cannot be adequately predicted based either on the spatial contiguity or on the observation of the past behavior. Prepaging advice generated by the programmer or the compiler is presented as a technique for the prediction of the phase transition behavior. To simplify the generation of the prepaging advice, the processes of the extraction of the phase transition behavior and the scheduling of the page transfers are decoupled. This, in turn, dictates the need for controlled prepaging, which is discussed next. A performance comparison of a sequential prepaging scheme and a user-aided prepaging scheme is carried out. The relative space-time product is presented as a measure of the effectiveness of a prepaging scheme. The effect of prepaging on system throughput is studied using a cyclic queuing model. © 1979 Springer-Verlag.