Tailoring Programs to Models of Program Behavior

This paper considers the premise that, in addition to trying to solve the virtual-memory-system performance problem by devising a storage management strategy suitable for the broad spectrum of behavior exhibited by programs, efforts also be made to tailor the behavior of each program to the model underlying the storage management strategy under which the program will have to run. It is observed that a viable approach to program tailoring is offered by restructuring techniques. The application of dynamic off-line techniques to the tailoring problem is discussed, and an algorithm which may be used to fit program behavior to the working set model is described in detail as an example. The performance of this algorithm in dealing with two real-program traces is experimentally evaluated under a variety of conditions and found to be always satisfactory.