Memory Aggregates: Controlling memory consumption among and within applications

19.08.2005

Abstract:
Current operating systems do not tie resource consumption to the proper principal. A principal, be it a process or the set of processes belonging to a user, is allowed to spawn off a large number of activites within the operating system kernel that consume resources which are largely unaccounted for. The result of this is that a process may be starved for CPU, disk, network, and memory depending on the activities of other processes.

In this thesis we present the Memory Aggregate mechanism, which provides control over how memory is apportioned among and within applications. The mechanism has been implemented within Vortex, an operating system kernel designed to ensure that one principal cannot arbitrarily degrade the performance of another principal. Through experiments we demonstrate how effective the Memory Aggregate mechanism is in isolating and controlling the memory consumption of applications running on Vortex.