Operating Systems
Choosing What to Forget
When physical memory is full, which page must be evicted?
Operating SystemsMemory ManagementPage ReplacementFIFOLRUOptimal
1. The Saturation Point
Imagine a system running under constraint. Its physical RAM is small, containing only 3 physical frames. Right now, physical memory is completely saturated, filled with three active pages:
RAM Frames: [ Page 2 | Page 5 | Page 7 ]
A thread executes an instruction requesting virtual address space residing in Page 3.
The MMU looks up the translation in the Page Table, finds it invalid, and raises a Page Fault. The Operating System traps the fault and prepares to copy Page 3 from disk into RAM. But there is a bottleneck: all physical frames are occupied.
To resolve the fault and bring Page 3 into memory, the operating system must choose one page currently in RAM and evict it back to disk.
This decision is known as Page Replacement.
2. Three Answers to the Same Question
How do we decide which page should leave? The policy we choose determines our system's memory efficiency. Three core algorithms answer this question:
First-In, First-Out (FIFO)
"Which Page arrived first?"
Evict the oldest page loaded into RAM, regardless of how frequently it is being used.
Least Recently Used (LRU)
"Which Page has been unused the longest?"
Evict the page that has not been accessed for the longest duration, relying on the principle of temporal locality.
Optimal (OPT)
"Which Page will be needed farthest in the future?"
Evict the page that will go the longest before being requested again.
3. Interactive Page Replacement Simulator
See how these three different strategies handle the exact same reference sequence under the same constraint:
Reference Sequence: 1 → 2 → 3 → 1 → 4
Observe how the exact same access trace produces completely different eviction choices and page fault rates depending on the active policy.
The Mathematical Ideal vs. Hardware Reality
The Optimal policy represents the absolute ceiling of performance, guaranteeing the minimum possible Page Faults for any known reference sequence. However, in practice, a real-world operating system cannot implement the Optimal policy because it cannot know future memory references in advance. Real-world systems must approximate this behavior using historical data, making LRU the standard benchmark for practical implementation.
4. Manthana: The Paging Boundary
We have learned how Paging places fixed-size pages into physical frames. We have also learned how Page Replacement decides which page should leave when all frames are occupied.
But notice something important: all of this assumes that memory is being managed as fixed-size pages.
What happens when a program needs memory as a meaningful, variable-sized unit rather than as a collection of equal-sized pages?
What if memory management followed the logical structure of the program itself?
Current Exploration
Choosing What to Forget
