VMMF: Volatile memory management framework

The growing size of computer memory offers an opportunity to improve the performance of applications by storing as much data as possible in memory. However, this aggressive memory utilization should be managed carefully, because severe system-wide performance degradation can result from virtual memory (VM) paging activities once a memory shortage occurs. In this study, we propose a volatile memory management framework (VMMF) for such applications. Volatile memory means the owner process desires to use it for better performance but the system can reclaim it asynchronously without saving the content into the swap area. The concept of this framework is similar to that of “weak reference” implemented in several programming languages with the garbage collection (GC) mechanism. We extend the concept to a programming style with explicit memory management, which is adopted by many applications implemented in C/C++. The VMMF can improve performance robustness against fluctuations in memory demand.