Methods for the Measurement of Memory Utilization and the Improvement of Program Locality

It is known that the locality of reference of a program can be improved by restructuring it. One approach for program restructuring is to rearrange the order of relocatable program sectors and to repackage those sectors of a program, that are needed within a relatively short time of one another, into the same virtual page. This approach needs no reprogramming of the source program. However, microscopic analysis of the internal structure of repackaged sectors often shows the existence of sectors only few portions of which are actually referenced while the sectors are in use.