Some Aspects of the Dynamic Behavior of Hierarchical Memories

In a computer system with a cache memory, the cache is effectively empty following a job switch, leading to a low hit rate and consequently lowered performance until the cache becomes reasonably full. The analysis shows that a job must run for several milliseconds before the average performance approaches that expected from a steady-state analysis. Care may therefore be needed in designing memory systems which have very high page-fault rates from main memory, or which include many levels in the memory hierarchy.