A technique for minimizing the paging on a system with a very heavy memory usage is proposed. When there are processes with active memory allocations that should be in the physical memory, but their accumulated size exceeds the physical memory capacity. In such cases, the operating system begins swapping pages in and out the memory on every context switch. The authors lessen this thrashing by placing the processes into several bins, using Bin Packing approximation algorithms. They amend the scheduler to maintain two levels of scheduling - medium-term scheduling and short-term scheduling. The mediumterm scheduler switches the bins in a Round-Robin manner, whereas the short-term scheduler uses the standard Linux scheduler to schedule the processes in each bin. The authors prove that this feature does not necessitate adjustments in the shared memory maintenance. In addition, they explain how to modify the new scheduler to be compatible with some elements of the original scheduler like priority and realtime privileges. Experimental results show substantial improvement on very loaded memories.
Inverse Bin-packing Number Problems: NP-Hardness and Approximation Algorithms