Understanding Virtual Memory

by Norm Murray and Neil Horman

Introduction

One of the most important aspects of an operating system is the Virtual Memory Management system. Virtual Memory (VM) allows an operating system to perform many of its advanced functions, such as process isolation, file caching, and swapping. As such, it is imperative that an administrator understand the functions and tunable parameters of an operating system's Virtual Memory Manager so that optimal performance for a given workload may be achieved. After reading this article, the reader should have a rudimentary understanding of the data the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL3) VM controls and the algorithms it uses. Further, the reader should have a fairly good understanding of general Linux VM tuning techniques. It is important to note that Linux as an operating system has a proud legacy of overhaul. Items which no longer serve useful purposes or which have better implementations as technology advances are phased out. This implies that the tuning parameters described in this article may be out of date if you are using a newer or older kernel. Fear not however! With a well grounded understanding of the general mechanics of a VM, it is fairly easy to convert knowledge of VM tuning to another VM. The same general principles apply, and documentation for a given kernel (including its specific tunable parameters) can be found in the corresponding kernel source tree under the file Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt.