AUTONOMICALLY TUNING THE VIRTUAL MEMORY SUBSYSTEM OF A COMPUTER OPERATING SYSTEM

摘要

A method, information processing system, and computer readable medium for efficiently distributing a computer system's main memory among applications running in that operating system instance. More specifically, threshold values used by a page replacement algorithm of the virtual memory manager are automatically tuned in response to the load on the memory of a computer system. One such threshold value is the lower threshold of free memory which is changed as a function of the load on the memory. For example, such a load might be represented as the number of threads that were added to a waiting queue during a defined interval of time divided by the number of clock tics in that interval. This representation is known as the thread wait rate. This rate is then compared to a target rate to determine if the lower threshold value should be changed. When the free memory space falls below the lower threshold, a page replacement daemon is used to page out memory to make more memory space available. ® KIPO & WIPO 2007