Anticipatory paging

This technique, sometimes called "swap prefetch", preloads a process's non-resident pages that are likely to be referenced in the near future (taking advantage of locality of reference). Such strategies attempt to reduce the number of page faults a process experiences. Some of those strategies are "if a program references one virtual address which causes a page fault, perhaps the next few pages' worth of virtual address space will soon be used" and "if one big program just finished execution, leaving lots of free RAM, perhaps the user will return to using some of the programs that were recently paged out".

[edit] Free page queue

The free page queue is a list of page frames that are available for assignment after a page fault. Some operating systems[NB 1] support page reclamation; if a page fault occurs for a page that had been stolen and the page frame was never reassigned, then the operating system avoids the necessity of reading the page back in by assigning the unmodified page frame.

[edit] Page stealing

Some operating systems periodically look for pages that have not been recently referenced and add them to the Free page queue, after paging them out if they have been modified.

[edit] Pre-cleaning
Unix operating systems periodically use sync to pre-clean all dirty pages, that is, to save all modified pages to hard disk. Windows operating systems do the same thing via "modified page writer" threads. Pre-cleaning makes starting a new program or opening a new data file much faster. The hard drive can immediately seek to that file and consecutively read the whole file into pre-cleaned page frames. Without pre-cleaning, the hard drive is forced to seek back and forth between writing a dirty page frame to disk, and then reading the next page of the file into that frame.