Critical Scrutiny of Page Replacement Algorithms: FIFO, Optimal and LRU

Abstract

Virtual memory plays an important role in memory management of an operating system. A process or a set of processes may have a requirement of memory space that may exceed the capacity of main memory. This situation is addressed by virtual memory where a certain memory space in secondary memory is treated as primary memory, i.e., main memory is virtually extended to secondary memory. When a process requires a page, it first scans in primary memory. If it is found then, process continues to execute, otherwise a situation arises, called page fault, which is addressed by page replacement algorithms. This algorithms swaps out a page from main memory to secondary memory and replaced it with another page from secondary memory in addition to the fact that it should have minimum page faults so that considerable amount of I/O operations, required for swapping in/out of pages, can be reduced. Several algorithms for page replacement have been formulated to increase the efficiency of page replacement technique. In this paper, mainly three page replacement algorithms: FIFO, Optimal and LRU are discussed, their behavioural pattern is analysed with systematic approach and a comparative analysis of these algorithms is recorded with proper diagram.