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An Aside: Working Sets (cont)

From observations of running programs ...
  • in any given window of time,
    a process is likely to access only a small subset of its pages
Known as the working set model   (cf locality of reference)

Only need to hold, at a given time, the process's working set of pages

Implications:

  • if each process has a relatively small working set,
    can hold pages for many active processes in memory at same time
  • if only need to hold some of process's pages in memory,
    process address space can be larger than physical memory