Operating System Support for General-Purpose Memory-Adaptive Applications

Many programs could improve their performance by adapt-ing their memory use according to availability. If memory is available, a web browser or DNS server could use a larger cache; if there is memory pressure, they could use a smaller one. Memory adaptations are also becoming increasingly important for scalability: server consolidation is being done more aggressively and end-users want to run their applica-tion on a wider-range of hardware configurations. Today, memory-based adaptations are fragile: general-purpose op-erating systems do not indicate how much memory a process should or could use. Enabling efficient adaptations requires rethinking how mem-ory is allocated among competing programs, and adding a feedback mechanism that allows applications to make in-formed adaptations. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a minimum-funding revocation scheduler for memory. We describe a novel algorithm to compute the amount of memory available to each resource principal based on its scheduling parameters and the current configuration, explain how to communicate this information to the princi-pals, and show how they can exploit it. We also present a new mechanism to account shared memory based on access frequency. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the tech-niques by showing that multiple applications changed to ex-ploit this information use the full memory available to them, and smoothly vary their demand as availability changes. This also results in significant increases in throughput rel-ative to the conservative management techniques currently used