Approximating the optimal replacement algorithm

LRU is the de facto standard page replacement strategy. It is well-known, however, that there are many situations where LRU behaves far from optimal. We present a replacement policy that approximates the optimal algorithm OPT more closely by predicting the time each page will be referenced again and by evicting the page that has the largest predicted time of next reference. Experiments using several benchmarks from the SPEC 2000 benchmark suite show that our algorithm is superior to LRU, in some cases by as much as 25%-30% and in one case by more than 100%.

[1]  Jean-Loup Baer,et al.  An effective on-chip preloading scheme to reduce data access penalty , 1991, Proceedings of the 1991 ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing (Supercomputing '91).

[2]  Nimrod Megiddo,et al.  ARC: A Self-Tuning, Low Overhead Replacement Cache , 2003, FAST.

[3]  Gerhard Weikum,et al.  The LRU-K page replacement algorithm for database disk buffering , 1993, SIGMOD Conference.

[4]  Yvon Jégou,et al.  Speculative prefetching , 1993, ICS '93.

[5]  Robert E. Tarjan,et al.  Amortized efficiency of list update and paging rules , 1985, CACM.

[6]  Allan Borodin,et al.  Competitive paging with locality of reference , 1991, STOC '91.

[7]  J.W.C. Fu,et al.  Stride Directed Prefetching In Scalar Processors , 1992, [1992] Proceedings the 25th Annual International Symposium on Microarchitecture MICRO 25.

[8]  Sandy Irani,et al.  Strongly competitive algorithms for paging with locality of reference , 1992, SODA '92.

[9]  David A. Patterson,et al.  Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach , 1969 .

[10]  Jean-Loup Baer,et al.  Modified LRU policies for improving second-level cache behavior , 2000, Proceedings Sixth International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture. HPCA-6 (Cat. No.PR00550).

[11]  John Flynn,et al.  Adapting the SPEC 2000 benchmark suite for simulation-based computer architecture research , 2001 .

[12]  Dennis Shasha,et al.  2Q: A Low Overhead High Performance Buffer Management Replacement Algorithm , 1994, VLDB.

[13]  Todd M. Austin,et al.  The SimpleScalar tool set, version 2.0 , 1997, CARN.

[14]  Amos Fiat,et al.  Experimental Studies of Access Graph Based Heuristics: Beating the LRU Standard? , 1997, SODA.

[15]  Santosh G. Abraham,et al.  Efficient simulation of caches under optimal replacement with applications to miss characterization , 1993, SIGMETRICS '93.