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Memory Compression
Virtual memory compression (also referred to as RAM compression and memory compression) is a memory management technique that utilizes data compression to reduce the size or number of paging requests to and from the auxiliary storage. In a virtual memory compression system, pages to be paged out of virtual memory are compressed and stored in physical memory, which is usually random-access memory (RAM), or sent as compressed to auxiliary storage such as a hard disk drive (HDD) or solid-state drive (SSD). In both cases the virtual memory range, whose contents has been compressed, is marked inaccessible so that attempts to access compressed pages can trigger page faults and reversal of the process (retrieval from auxiliary storage and decompression). The footprint of the data being paged is reduced by the compression process; in the first instance, the freed RAM is returned to the available physical memory pool, while the compressed portion is kept in RAM. In the second instance, the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Memory Management
Memory management is a form of resource management applied to computer memory. The essential requirement of memory management is to provide ways to dynamically allocate portions of memory to programs at their request, and free it for reuse when no longer needed. This is critical to any advanced computer system where more than a single process might be underway at any time. Several methods have been devised that increase the effectiveness of memory management. Virtual memory systems separate the memory addresses used by a process from actual physical addresses, allowing separation of processes and increasing the size of the virtual address space beyond the available amount of RAM using paging or swapping to secondary storage. The quality of the virtual memory manager can have an extensive effect on overall system performance. In some operating systems, e.g. OS/360 and successors, memory is managed by the operating system. In other operating systems, e.g. Unix-like operating sy ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Connectix
Connectix Corporation was a software and hardware company, noted for having released innovative products that were either made obsolete as Apple Computer incorporated the ideas into system software, or were sold to other companies once they became popular. It was formed in October 1988 by Jon Garber; dominant board members and co-founders were Garber, Bonnie Fought (the two were later married), and close friend Roy McDonald. McDonald was still Chief Executive Officer and president when Connectix finally closed in August 2003. Products Primary products included these: * Virtual: Its original flagship product, which introduced virtual memory to the Macintosh operating system, Mac OS, years before Apple's implementation in System 7. Virtual also runs on a motley assortment of accelerator cards for the original Mac, Mac Plus, and Mac SE, which were not supported by Apple. * HandOff II: The file launcher developed by Fred Hollander of Utilitron, Inc. This INIT for Macintosh solved t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
RISC IX
RISC iX is a discontinued Unix operating system designed to run on a series of workstations based on the Acorn Archimedes microcomputer. Heavily based on 4.3BSD, it was initially completed in 1988, a year after Arthur but before RISC OS. It was introduced in the ARM2-based R140 workstation in 1989, followed up by the ARM3-based R200-series workstations in 1990. Features Acorn chose BSD 4.3 as the basis for RISC iX due to its academic origins, these being considered as making the software more appropriate for Acorn's principal target market of tertiary education. SunOS and NeXTSTEP systems were given as examples of other "modern high-performance workstations that use BSD". Other reasons for choosing BSD included better integration of networking and connectivity tools in comparison to System V. * X11 (initially Release 2) with Ardent Window Manager, Tab Window Manager and Ultrix Window Manager available by default, plus X.desktop from IXI Limited * System V virtual memory exte ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Acorn Computers
Acorn Computers Ltd. was a British computer company established in Cambridge, England, in 1978. The company produced a number of computers which were especially popular in the United Kingdom, UK, including the Acorn Electron and the Acorn Archimedes. Acorn's computer dominated the UK educational computer market during the 1980s. Though the company was acquired and largely dismantled in early 1999, with various activities being dispersed amongst new and established companies, its legacy includes the development of reduced instruction set computing (RISC) personal computers. One of its operating systems, , continues to be developed by RISC OS Open. Some activities established by Acorn lived on: technology developed by Arm (company), Arm, created by Acorn as a joint venture with Apple, Inc., Apple and VLSI Technology, VLSI in 1990, is dominant in the mobile phone and personal digital assistant (PDA) microprocessor market. Acorn is sometimes referred to as the "British Apple" and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
DDR3
Double Data Rate 3 Synchronous Dynamic Random-Access Memory (DDR3 SDRAM) is a type of synchronous dynamic random-access memory (SDRAM) with a high bandwidth ("double data rate") interface, and has been in use since 2007. It is the higher-speed successor to DDR and DDR2 and predecessor to DDR4 synchronous dynamic random-access memory (SDRAM) chips. DDR3 SDRAM is neither forward nor backward compatible with any earlier type of random-access memory (RAM) because of different signaling voltages, timings, and other factors. DDR3 is a DRAM interface specification. The actual DRAM arrays that store the data are similar to earlier types, with similar performance. The primary benefit of DDR3 SDRAM over its immediate predecessor DDR2 SDRAM, is its ability to transfer data at twice the rate (eight times the speed of its internal memory arrays), enabling higher bandwidth or peak data rates. The DDR3 standard permits DRAM chip capacities of up to 8 gigabits (Gbit), and up to four ranks o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Moore's Law
Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of physics, it is an empirical relationship linked to gains from experience in production. The observation is named after Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel (and former CEO of the latter), who in 1965 posited a doubling every year in the number of components per integrated circuit, and projected this rate of growth would continue for at least another decade. In 1975, looking forward to the next decade, he revised the forecast to doubling every two years, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 41%. While Moore did not use empirical evidence in forecasting that the historical trend would continue, his prediction held since 1975 and has since become known as a "law". Moore's prediction has been used in the semiconductor industry to g ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Least Recently Used
In computing, cache algorithms (also frequently called cache replacement algorithms or cache replacement policies) are optimizing instructions, or algorithms, that a computer program or a hardware-maintained structure can utilize in order to manage a cache of information stored on the computer. Caching improves performance by keeping recent or often-used data items in memory locations that are faster or computationally cheaper to access than normal memory stores. When the cache is full, the algorithm must choose which items to discard to make room for the new ones. Overview The average memory reference time is : T = m \times T_m + T_h + E where : m = miss ratio = 1 - (hit ratio) : T_m = time to make a main memory access when there is a miss (or, with multi-level cache, average memory reference time for the next-lower cache) : T_h= the latency: the time to reference the cache (should be the same for hits and misses) : E = various secondary effects, such as queuing effects in mult ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thrashing (computer Science)
In computer science, thrashing occurs when a computer's virtual memory resources are overused, leading to a constant state of paging and page faults, inhibiting most application-level processing. This causes the performance of the computer to degrade or collapse. The situation can continue indefinitely until either the user closes some running applications or the active processes free up additional virtual memory resources. After completing initialization, most programs operate on a small number of code and data pages compared to the total memory the program requires. The pages most frequently accessed are called the working set. When the working set is a small percentage of the system's total number of pages, virtual memory systems work most efficiently and an insignificant amount of computing is spent resolving page faults. As the working set grows, resolving page faults remains manageable until the growth reaches a critical point. Then faults go up dramatically and the time ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Process (computing)
In computing, a process is the instance of a computer program that is being executed by one or many threads. There are many different process models, some of which are light weight, but almost all processes (even entire virtual machines) are rooted in an operating system (OS) process which comprises the program code, assigned system resources, physical and logical access permissions, and data structures to initiate, control and coordinate execution activity. Depending on the OS, a process may be made up of multiple threads of execution that execute instructions concurrently. While a computer program is a passive collection of instructions typically stored in a file on disk, a process is the execution of those instructions after being loaded from the disk into memory. Several processes may be associated with the same program; for example, opening up several instances of the same program often results in more than one process being executed. Multitasking is a method to allow ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
I/O-bound
In computer science, I/O bound refers to a condition in which the time it takes to complete a computation is determined principally by the period spent waiting for input/output operations to be completed. This is the opposite of a task being CPU bound. This circumstance arises when the rate at which data is requested is slower than the rate it is consumed or, in other words, more time is spent requesting data than processing it. I/O bound as an inherent problem in computing The I/O bound state has been identified as a problem in computing almost since its inception. The Von Neumann architecture, which is employed by many computing devices, this involves multiple possible solutions such as implementing a logically separate central processor unit which along with storing the instructions of the program also retrieves actual data usually from main memory and makes use of this more accessible data for working. When the process is terminated it writes back the results to the original s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Disk Compression
A disk compression software utility increases the amount of information that can be stored on a hard disk drive of given size. Unlike a file compression utility, which compresses only specified files—and which requires the user to designate the files to be compressed—an on-the-fly disk compression utility works automatically through resident software without the user needing to be aware of its existence. On-the-fly disk compression is therefore also known as transparent, real-time or online disk compression. When information needs to be stored to the hard disk, the utility compresses the information. When information needs to be read, the utility decompresses the information. A disk compression utility overrides the standard operating system routines. Since all software applications access the hard disk using these routines, they continue to work after disk compression has been installed. Disk compression utilities were popular especially in the early 1990s, when micro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Data Compression Ratio
Data compression ratio, also known as compression power, is a measurement of the relative reduction in size of data representation produced by a data compression algorithm. It is typically expressed as the division of uncompressed size by compressed size. Definition Data compression ratio is defined as the ratio between the ''uncompressed size'' and ''compressed size'': : = \frac Thus, a representation that compresses a file's storage size from 10 MB to 2 MB has a compression ratio of 10/2 = 5, often notated as an explicit ratio, 5:1 (read "five" to "one"), or as an implicit ratio, 5/1. This formulation applies equally for compression, where the uncompressed size is that of the original; and for decompression, where the uncompressed size is that of the reproduction. Sometimes the ''space saving'' is given instead, which is defined as the reduction in size relative to the uncompressed size: : = 1 - \frac Thus, a representation that compresses the storage size of a file from 1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
