Token-ordered LRU: an effective page replacement policy and its implementation in Linux systems

After a careful study on characterizing the memory usage and the thrashing behaviors in the multi-programming system using LRU replacement. we propose an LRU replacement alternative, called token-ordered LRU, to eliminate or reduce the unnecessary page faults by effectively ordering and scheduling memory space allocations. Compared with traditional thrashing protection mechanisms such as load control, our policy allows more processes to keep running to support synchronous distributed process computing. We have implemented the token-ordered LRU algorithm in a Linux kernel to show its effectiveness.