To understand the impact of the working set size on the paging policy, we measure the execution time of one of our applications (FFT), as a function of its input size. The completion time of FFT both under PARITY_LOGGING and under DISK is plotted in figure 3. We see that as soon as the working set size exceeds 18 MBytes, the paging starts, and the completion time of the application rises sharply. Most users would not be willing to tolerate such a high overhead in order to run an application that does not fit in main memory. Fortunately, remote memory reduces this overhead substantially.
Figure 3: Performance of FFT as a function of input size
when either the disk, or remote memory are used as backing store.