The above observations can be useful to researchers, programmers, and practitioners that want to understand, visualize, and/or improve the performance of their applications.
For example, the periodicity of page accesses and the long sequential accesses seen in several of the studied applications can be used by operating systems to implement policies that will prefetch pages before they are actually needed. Prefetching pages has shown to reduce the high latency observed in virtual memory systems [3]. The existence of regular access patterns makes prefetching more effective. The regularity of access patterns can also be used in disk block placement policies so that nearby-accessed pages be placed in nearby physical disk blocks. Similar observations can also be used by stripping policies in RAIDS and in the organization of segmented caches. The abrupt changes in working sets that were observed in most applications, can also be taken into account by page replacement algorithms.