Chapter 7
Memory
System main memory stores application and kernel instructions, their working data, and file system caches. The secondary storage for this data is typically the storage devices—the disks—which operate orders of magnitude more slowly. Once main memory has filled, the system may begin switching data between main memory and the storage devices. This is a slow process that will often become a system bottleneck, dramatically decreasing performance. The system may also terminate the largest memory-consuming process, causing application outages.
Other performance factors to consider include the CPU expense of allocating and freeing memory, copying memory, and managing memory address space mappings. On multisocket architectures, memory ...
Get Systems Performance, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
