Page Replacement

Page replacement algorithms decide which memory pages to page out (swap out, write to disk) when a page of memory needs to be allocated. Paging happens when a page fault occurs and a free page cannot be used to satisfy the allocation, either because there are none, or because the number of free pages is lower than some threshold. Requirements for page replacement algorithms have changed due to differences in operating system kernel architectures. In particular, most modern OS kernels have unified virtual memory and file system caches, requiring the page replacement algorithm to select a page from among the pages of both user program virtual address spaces and cached files.

Replacement algorithms can be local or global.
When a process incurs a page fault, a local page replacement algorithm selects for replacement some page that belongs to that same process (or a group of processes sharing a memory partition). A global replacement algorithm is free to select any page in memory.
There are a variety of page replacement algorithms :
- Optimal page replacement algorithm
- Not Recently Used (NRU)
- First-in, first-out (FIFO)
- Second-chance
- Clock
- Least recently used (LRU)
- Random replacement algorithm
- Not frequently used (NFU)
- Aging