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In a computer operating system that uses paging for virtual memory management, page replacement algorithms decide which memory pages to page out (swap out, write to disk) when a page of memory needs to be allocated. Paging happens when a page fault occurs and a free page cannot be used to satisfy the allocation, either because there are none, or because the number of free pages is lower than some threshold. When the page that was selected for replacement and paged out is referenced again it has to be paged in (read in from disk), and this involves waiting for I/O completion. This determines the ''quality'' of the page replacement algorithm: the less time waiting for page-ins, the better the algorithm. A page replacement algorithm looks at the limited information about accesses to the pages provided by hardware, and tries to guess which pages should be replaced to minimize the total number of page misses, while balancing this with the costs (primary storage and processor time) of the algorithm itself. The page replacing problem is a typical online problem from the competitive analysis perspective in the sense that the optimal deterministic algorithm is known. == History == Page replacement algorithms were a hot topic of research and debate in the 1960s and 1970s. That mostly ended with the development of sophisticated LRU (least recently used) approximations and working set algorithms. Since then, some basic assumptions made by the traditional page replacement algorithms were invalidated, resulting in a revival of research. In particular, the following trends in the behavior of underlying hardware and user-level software have affected the performance of page replacement algorithms: * Size of primary storage has increased by multiple orders of magnitude. With several gigabytes of primary memory, algorithms that require a periodic check of each and every memory frame are becoming less and less practical. * Memory hierarchies have grown taller. The cost of a CPU cache miss is far more expensive. This exacerbates the previous problem. * Locality of reference of user software has weakened. This is mostly attributed to the spread of object-oriented programming techniques that favor large numbers of small functions, use of sophisticated data structures like trees and hash tables that tend to result in chaotic memory reference patterns, and the advent of garbage collection that drastically changed memory access behavior of applications. Requirements for page replacement algorithms have changed due to differences in operating system kernel architectures. In particular, most modern OS kernels have unified virtual memory and file system caches, requiring the page replacement algorithm to select a page from among the pages of both user program virtual address spaces and cached files. The latter pages have specific properties. For example, they can be locked, or can have write ordering requirements imposed by journaling. Moreover, as the goal of page replacement is to minimize total time waiting for memory, it has to take into account memory requirements imposed by other kernel sub-systems that allocate memory. As a result, page replacement in modern kernels (Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris) tends to work at the level of a general purpose kernel memory allocator, rather than at the higher level of a virtual memory subsystem. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「page replacement algorithm」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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