Hardware Estimation of a Process' Primary Memory Requirements
A minor hardware extension to the Honeywell
6180 processor is demonstrated to allow the primary 
memory requirements of a process in Multics to be approximated.
 The additional hardware required for 
this estimate to be computed consists of a program accessible
register containing the miss rate of the 
associative memory used for page table words.  This
primary memory requirement estimate was employed 
in an experimental version of Multics to control the
level of multiprogramming in the system and to bill 
for memory usage.  The resulting system's tuning parameters
display configuration insensitivity, and
it is conjectured that the system would also track shifts
in the referencing characteristics of its workload 
and keep the system in tune.
CACM September, 1977
Giffor, D. K.
