Performance
Page faults, by their very nature, degrade the performance of a program or operating system and in the degenerate case can cause thrashing. Optimizations to programs and the operating system that reduce the number of page faults improve the performance of the program or even the entire system. The two primary focuses of the optimization effort are reducing overall memory usage and improving memory locality. Generally, making more physical memory available also reduces page faults. Many page replacement algorithms have been proposed, such as implementing heuristic-based algorithms to reduce the incidence of page faults.
An average hard disk has an average rotational latency of 3ms, a seek-time of 5ms, and a transfer-time of 0.05ms/page. So the total time for paging comes in near 8ms (8 000 000 ns). If the memory access time is 200ns, then the page fault would make the operation about 40,000 times slower. To reduce the page faults in the system, programmers must make use of an appropriate page replacement algorithm that suits the current requirements and maximizes the page hits.
Read more about this topic: Page Fault
Famous quotes containing the word performance:
“True balance requires assigning realistic performance expectations to each of our roles. True balance requires us to acknowledge that our performance in some areas is more important than in others. True balance demands that we determine what accomplishments give us honest satisfaction as well as what failures cause us intolerable grief.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“The way to go to the circus, however, is with someone who has seen perhaps one theatrical performance before in his life and that in the High School hall.... The scales of sophistication are struck from your eyes and you see in the circus a gathering of men and women who are able to do things as a matter of course which you couldn’t do if your life depended on it.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“Having an identity at work separate from an identity at home means that the work role can help absorb some of the emotional shock of domestic distress. Even a mediocre performance at the office can help a person repair self-esteem damaged in domestic battles.”
—Faye J. Crosby (20th century)