Explicit non-reusable page cache management to minimize last level cache pollution

In multicore processor, managing shared last level cache is important for overall system performance. Cache contention incurred by OS page caches is serious since the page caches are usually large but less likely reused. The non-reusable page caches, however, pollute the last level cache and interfere the performance of co-running memory-intensive applications. In this paper, we propose a new page cache management scheme which is aimed at minimizing cache pollution incurred by the non-reusable page caches. We identify the non-reusable page caches from a priori information of applications that read page caches once and are unlikely to be access them again. The page caches allocated by the applications are isolated from the other memory data by page coloring, a well-known cache partitioning technique. The isolation guarantees no cache pollution incurred by the non-reusable page caches. The evaluation of our prototype in Linux 2.6.39 showed that cache pollution by non-reusable page caches is successfully alleviated while reducing cache misses by up to 76%. The minimized cache pollution leads to the execution time reduction by up to 50% in our tested cases.