An empirical study of the effects of careful page placement in Linux

This paper reports the results of an empirical investigation of the performance efkts of page placement policies in the Linux operating system. We show that several computationally intensive workloads having moderate memory demands are relatively insensitive to the page placement strategy used. In addition, we show that the default “Buddy system* of real storage management in Linux is, in a single user workstation, an effective careful page placement mechanism in its own right.