Page Size Considerations
How to select a page size?
Tradeoffs:
- Size of the page table - to keep it relatively small, we need bigger pages).
- Memory utilization - better with smaller pages because of less internal fragmentation.
- I/O time - latency / throughput characteristics call for bigger pages.
- Capturing locality - better with smaller pages because of better resolution.
Historical trend is for bigger page sizes.
- Memory is cheap so we care less about utilization.
- Disk access advances in slower pace compared with memory/CPU so I/O factor is most important.