Economic Theory for Memory Management Optimization

In this position paper, we examine how economic theory can be applied to memory management. We observe the correspondence between the economic notion of a consumer and an instance of a virtual machine running a single pro-gram in an isolated heap. Economic resource consumption corresponds to the virtual machine requesting and receiving increased amounts of heap memory from the underlying op-erating system. As more memory is allocated to a virtual machine’s heap, there is additional benefit (cf. economic util-ity) from the extra resource. We also discuss production and cost functions, which might assist in efficient memory alloca-tion between multiple virtual machines that are competing for a fixed amount of shared system memory