SUN: Priority Paging

Finally, virtual memory the right way!

Priority paging is the name that SUN gives to what should be the default way of handling virtual memory. One of the things that drove me nuts when I moved from HP to SUN was the fact that there was no way to limit the filesystem buffer cache (bufpages, dbc_min_pct/dbc_max_pct, & nbuf, if'n you're curious re HP). I would have a system with 4-gigs of RAM actively paging because of the cache. There's something not right with that.

So, SUN introduced the concept of priority paging. There's a paper on sun-on-net that describes the issue and the solution a whole lot better than I could. It's called: Priority Paging by Richard McDougall, Triet Vo, and Tom Pothier.