Computation of page fault probability from program transition diagram

An algorithm is given for calculating page fault probability in a virtual memory system operating under demand paging with various memory sizes and replacement rules. A first order Markov model of program behavior is assumed, and a representation of the system based on memory states, control states, and memory substates is presented. The algorithm is general in the sense that the page fault probabilities can be calculated for nonpredictive replacement rules applied to any program represented by a one-step Markov chain. A detailed example is given to illustrate the algorithm for Random and Least Recently Used (LRU) replacement rules.

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