Optimizing Swap Use of Programs Using Memory Access Profiling

Yunjae Lee, Heon Y. Yeom, Hyuck Han

http://doi.org/10.5626/JOK.2020.47.5.466

The slow growth rate of main memory and modern computing workloads requires lots of memory, making main memory the bottleneck of system performance. Swapping provides a large virtual memory to programs by utilizing fast but small main memory and large secondary storage. However, programs cannot accomplish optimal performance due to conservative swapping policy which targets general workloads. The objective of this study was to analyze memory access pattern of programs and optimize programs to utilize swapping considering memory access pattern. A low-overhead memory profiling technique and a simple optimization technique can help programmers optimize their programs with ease. We optimized six workloads using these techniques and improved the performance of the workloads by 43%.