Program behavior and the page-fault-frequency replacement algorithm

Virtual memory is one of the major concepts that has evolved in computer architecture over the last decade. It has had a great impact on the design of new computer systems since it was first introduced by the designers of the Atlas computer in 1962. A virtual memory is usually divided into blocks of contiguous locations to allow an efficient mapping of the logical addresses into the physical address space. In this paper, we are concerned with paging systems, that is, systems for which the blocks of contiguous locations are of equal size. The memory system consists of two levels: main memory and auxiliary memory. The occurrence of a reference to a page that is currently not in main memory is called a page fault. A page fault results in the interruption of the program and the transfer of the referenced page from auxiliary to main memory.