• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.36 no.6
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• pp.476-487
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• 2009

The virtual memory system in 4.4 BSD operating systems exploits a clustering scheme to reduce disk I/Os in paging out (or flushing) modified pages that are intended to be replaced in order to make free rooms in memory. Upon the page out of a victim page, the scheme stores a cluster (or group) of modified pages contiguous with the victim in the virtual address space to swap disk at a single disk write. However, it fails to find large clusters of contiguous pages if applications change pages not adjacent with each other in the virtual address space. To address the problem, we propose a new clustering scheme called Multiple-Object Clustering (MOC), which together stores multiple clusters in the virtual address space at a single disk write instead of paging out the clusters to swap space at separate disk I/Os. This multiple-cluster transfer allows the virtual memory system to significantly decrease disk writes, thus improving the page-out performance. Our experiments in the FreeBSD 6.2 show that MOC improves the execution times of realistic benchmarks such as NS2, Scimark2 SOR, and nbench LU over the traditional clustering scheme ranging from 9 to 45%.