Department of Computer Science Course: CS 3725

Virtual memory replacement algorithms

As mentioned earlier, page misses interrupt a process in virtual memory systems, and therefore it is worthwhile to expend additional effort to reduce their frequency. Page misses are handled in the system software, so the cost of this added complexity is small.

There are two classes of replacement schemes; fixed replacement schemes, where the number of pages for a process is fixed, and variable replacement schemes, where the number of pages available for a process varies over the life of the process.