An empirical study of the behavior of programs in a paging environment

This paper reports initial results from an empirical study directed at the measurement of program operating behavior in those multiprogramming systems in which programs are organized into fixed length pages. The data collected from the interpretive execution of a number of paged programs is used to describe the frequency of page faults; i.e. the frequency of those instants at which an executing program requires a page of data or instructions not in main (core) memory. These data are used also for the evaluation of two page replacement algorithms and for assessing the effects on performance of changes in the amount of storage allocated to executing programs.