Demand Paging

According to the concept of Virtual Memory, in order to execute some process, only a part of the process needs to be present in the main memory which means that only a few pages will only be present in the main memory at any time.

However, deciding, which pages need to be kept in the main memory and which need to be kept in the secondary memory, is going to be difficult because we cannot say in advance that a process will require a particular page at particular time.

Therefore, to overcome this problem, there is a concept called Demand Paging is introduced. It suggests keeping all pages of the frames in the secondary memory until they are required. In other words, it says that do not load any page in the main memory until it is required.

Whenever any page is referred for the first time in the main memory, then that page will be found in the secondary memory.

After that, it may or may not be present in the main memory depending upon the page replacement algorithm which will be covered later in this tutorial.

What is a Page Fault?

If the referred page is not present in the main memory then there will be a miss and the concept is called Page miss or page fault.

The CPU has to access the missed page from the secondary memory. If the number of page fault is very high then the effective access time of the system will become very high.

What is Thrashing?

If the number of page faults is equal to the number of referred pages or the number of page faults are so high so that the CPU remains busy in just reading the pages from the secondary memory then the effective access time will be the time taken by the CPU to read one word from the secondary memory and it will be so high. The concept is called thrashing.

If the page fault rate is PF %, the time taken in getting a page from the secondary memory and again restarting is S (service time) and the memory access time is ma then the effective access time can be given as;

EAT = PF X S + (1 - PF) X (ma)