Evaluating Memory Compression and Deduplication

Many programs require more RAM to hold their data than a typical computer has. Theoretically, both the compression and deduplication can trade the rich computing capacity for more available RAM space. This paper comprehensively evaluates the performance behaviour of memory compression and memory deduplication by using seven real memory traces. The experimental results give two implications: (1) Memory deduplication greatly outperforms memory block compression. (2) Fixed-size partition (FSP) achieves the best performance in contrast to Content-defined Chunking (CDC) and Sliding Block (SB). The optimal chunking size of FSP is equal to the size of a memory page. The analysis results in this paper should be able to provide useful insights for designing or implementing systems that require abundant memory resources to enhance the system performance.