A page fault equation for dynamic heap sizing
Yong Chiang Tay, Xuanran Zong · 2010
For garbage-collected applications, dynamically-allocated objects are contained in a heap. Programmer productivity improves significantly if there is a garbage collector to automatically de-allocate objects that are no longer needed by the applications. However, there is a run-time performance overhead in garbage collection, and this cost is sensitive to heap size H: a smaller H will trigger more collection, but a large H can cause page faults, as when H exceeds the size M of main memory allocated to the application.