Performance
Page faults, by their very nature, degrade the performance of a program or operating system and in the degenerate case can cause thrashing. Optimizations to programs and the operating system that reduce the number of page faults improve the performance of the program or even the entire system. The two primary focuses of the optimization effort are reducing overall memory usage and improving memory locality. Generally, making more physical memory available also reduces page faults. Many page replacement algorithms have been proposed, such as implementing heuristic-based algorithms to reduce the incidence of page faults.
An average hard disk has an average rotational latency of 3ms, a seek-time of 5ms, and a transfer-time of 0.05ms/page. So the total time for paging comes in near 8ms (8 000 000 ns). If the memory access time is 200ns, then the page fault would make the operation about 40,000 times slower. To reduce the page faults in the system, programmers must make use of an appropriate page replacement algorithm that suits the current requirements and maximizes the page hits.
Read more about this topic: Page Fault
Famous quotes containing the word performance:
“They say all lovers swear more performance than they are able, and yet reserve an ability that they never perform; vowing more than the perfection of ten, and discharging less than the tenth part of one.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“No performance is worth loss of geniality. ‘Tis a cruel price we pay for certain fancy goods called fine arts and philosophy.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)