Program analysis for page size selection

Abstract

To support high performance architectures with multiple page sizes, it is necessary to assign proper page sizes for array memory in order to improve TLB performance as well as reduce memory contention during program execution. Typically, while a smaller page size causes higher TLB contention, a larger page size causes higher memory contention and fragmentation but also has the effect of prefetching pages required in future thereby reducing the number of cold page faults. Each array in a program contributes to these costs/benefits depending upon how it is referenced in the program. The page size assignment analysis determines a proper page size for every array by analyzing memory reference patterns (which is shown to be NP-hard). We discuss various policies that can be followed for page size assignment in order to maximize performance along with cost models and present algorithms for page size selection.