A unified analysis of paging and caching

Paging (caching) is the problem of managing a two-level memory hierarchy in order to minimise the time required to process a sequence of memory accesses. In order to measure this quantity, we define the system parameter miss penalty to represent the extra time required to access slow memory. In the context of paging, miss penalty is large, so most previous studies of on-line paging have implicitly set miss penalty=∞ in order to simplify the model. We show that this seemingly insignificant simplification substantially alters the precision of derived results. Consequently, we reintroduce miss penalty to the paging problem and present a more accurate analysis of on-line paging (and caching). We validate using this more accurate model by deriving intuitively appealing results for the paging problem which cannot be derived using the simplified model