APC: An Adaptive Page Prefetching Control Scheme in Virtual Memory System

Virtual memory systems (VM) reduce disk I/Os caused by page faults using page prefetching, which reads pages together with a desired page at a page fault in a single disk I/O. Operating systems including 4.4BSD attempt to prefetch as many pages as possible at a page fault regardless of page access patterns of applications. However, such an approach increases a disk access time taken to service a page fault when a high portion of the prefetched pages is not referenced. More seriously, the approach can cause the memory pollution, a problem that prefetched pages not to be accessed evict another pages that will be referenced soon. To solve these problems, we propose an adaptive page prefetching control scheme (APC), which periodically monitors access patterns of prefetched pages in a process unit. Such a pattern is represented as the ratio of referenced pages among prefetched ones before they are evicted from memory. Then APC uses the ratio to adjust the number of pages that 4.4BSD VM intends to prefetch at a page fault. Thus APC allows 4.4BSD VM to prefetch a proper number of pages to have a better effect on reducing disk I/Os, though page access patterns of an application vary in runtime. The experiment of our technique implemented in FreeBSD 6.2 shows that APC improves the execution times of SOR, SMM, and FFT benchmarks over 4.4BSD VM by up to 57%.