Method for managing virtual memory to separate active and stable memory

Abstract

A method for compacting blocks of memory in a demand paged virtual address space which includes a plurality of virtual address pages includes identifying active and stable blocks to be compacted by defining a pointer to indicate a page of the virtual memory space, and advancing the pointer to continually indicate the page of the beginning of the available virtual memory space. As new blocks are allocated, they are located in the virtual address space beginning at the next available location of the advancing pointer. As blocks are referenced by the user, they are moved to the current location of the advancing pointer, so that, stable blocks may be collected together on stable pages and active blocks are collected together on active pages. A disk memory is provided, and periodically the pages containing collected stable blocks are 'paged-out' to it. The method improves the overall throughput of data in the memory by reducing the time waiting for disk, the time in which the CPU is delayed during frequent garbage collections, and the allocation response time. Also, the method insures efficient use of the backing store by insuring that sparsely allocated pages are not written out to disk.