Economic Utility Theory for Memory Management Optimization

In this position paper, we examine how economic theory can be applied to memory management. We observe the correspondence between the economic notion of a consumer and an instance of a virtual machine running a single program in an isolated heap. Economic resource consumption corresponds to the virtual machine requesting and receiving increased amounts of heap memory from the underlying operating system. As more memory is allocated to a virtual machine's heap, there is additional benefit (cf. economic utility) from the extra resource. We also discuss production and cost functions, which might assist in efficient memory allocation between multiple virtual machines that are competing for a fixed amount of shared system memory.