Hardware Estimatino of a Process' Primary Memory Requirements

Abstract

It is shown that a process' primary memory requirements can be approximated by use of the miss rate in the Honeywell 6180's page table word associative memory. This primary memory requirement estimate was employed by an experimental version of Multics to control the level of multiprogramming in the system, and bill for memory usage. The resultant system's tuning parameters were shown to be configuration insensitive, and it was conjectured that the system would also track shifts in the referencing characteristics of its workload and keep the system in tune. The limitations of the assumptions made about a process' referencing characteristics are examined, and directions for future research are outlined.