Computer performance improvement by adjusting a time used for preemptive eviction of cache entries
AssigneeHewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P.
InventorsBlaine D. Gaither, Benjamin D. Osecky
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Abstract
A cache memory system can determine that an entry is stale if the entry has not been accessed or modified for a predetermined time. If an entry is stale, the entry may be preemptively evicted. The predetermined time is made dynamically variable. A computer system can adjust the time to optimize a measure of performance. In a specific example, evicted lines are temporarily stored in an eviction queue. The time is adjusted to be as short as possible without substantially increasing the number of lines that must be recalled from the eviction queue.
Claims8
A method of improving performance of a computer system, comprising:
- (a) specifying a time period;
- (b) evicting, from a cache memory, at least one entry that has remained unchanged for at least the time period;
- (c) measuring at least one performance parameter;
- (d) changing the value of the time period;
- (e) repeating steps (b) and (c);
- and
- (f) determining whether the performance parameter has changed.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.