Footprints in the cache

Abstract
This paper develops an analytical model for a cache-reload transient. When an interrupt program or system program runs periodically in a cache-based computer, a short cache-reload transient occurs each time the interrupt program is invoked. That transient depends on the size of the cache, the fraction of the cache used by the interrupt program, and the fraction of the cache used by background programs that run between interrupts. We call the portion of a cache used by a program its footprint in the cache, and we show that the reload transient is related to the area in the tail of a normal distribution whose mean is a function of the footprints of the programs that compete for the cache. We believe that the model may be useful as well for predicting paging behavior in virtual-memory systems with round-robin scheduling.

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