Abstract
The effectiveness of buffer cache replacement algorithms is critical to the performance of I/O systems. In this paper, we propose the degree of inter-reference gap (DIG) based block replacement scheme that retains merits of the least recently used (LRU) such as simple implementation and good cache hit ratio (CHR) for general patterns of references, and improves CHR further. In the proposed scheme, cache blocks with low DIGs are distinguished from blocks with high DIGs and the replacement block is selected among high DIGs blocks as done in the low inter-reference recency set (LIRS) scheme. Thus, by having the effect of the partitioning the cache memory dynamically based on DIGs, CHR is improved. Trace-driven simulation is employed to verified the superiority of the DIG based scheme and shows that the performance improves up to about 175% compared to the LRU scheme and 3% compared to the LIRS scheme for the same traces.