Methods and system for swapping memory in a virtual machine environment

A method for unloading memory pages in a virtualized environment, the method comprising:

• by a computer system comprising computer hardware:
• determining an inactive time during which a first virtual machine instance of a plurality of virtual machine instances is deallocated a central processing unit (CPU) resource relative to the other virtual machine instances based on CPU scheduling information;
• identifying one or more memory pages associated with the first virtual machine instance wherein the one or more memory pages are maintained in computer memory;
• and
• unloading the one or more memory pages associated with the first virtual machine instance from computer memory based in part on the determined inactive time.

A method for managing memory resources in a virtualized environment, the method comprising:

• by a computer system comprising computer hardware:
• determining an estimated inactive time for each of a plurality of virtual machine instances based on central processing unit (CPU) scheduling information, where each of the plurality of virtual machine instances has one or more associated memory pages in paged pool memory;
• determining one or more memory pages to swap out from the paged pool memory based on a comparison of estimated inactive times for the plurality of virtual machine instances;
• and
• swapping out the one or more memory pages from the paged pool memory.

A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium having stored thereon instructions that, when executed, direct a computing system to perform operations comprising:

• determining an estimated inactive time for each of a plurality of virtual machine instances relative to the other virtual machine instances based on processor scheduling information;
• and
• deallocating memory resources of the computing system storing data associated with the plurality of virtual machine instances based in part on the determined inactive times;
• wherein the plurality of virtual machine instances share processing resources and memory resources of the computing system.