Improving disk bandwidth-bound applications through main memory compression
Vicenç Beltrán, Jordi Torres, Eduard Ayguadé · 2007
The objective of main memory compression techniques is to reduce the in-memory data size to virtually enlarge the available memory on the system. The main benefit of this technique is the reduction of slow disk I/O operations, thus improving data access latency and saving disk I/O bandwidth. On the other hand, its main drawback is the large amount of CPU power needed by the computationally expensive compression algorithms, that make it unsuitable for medium to large CPU intensive applications.