Minimizing Paging Activity

Any process that accesses a new page causes a page fault, which is an expensive operation. Because shared objects can be used by many processes, any reduction in the number of page faults that are generated by accessing a shared object can benefit the process and the system as a whole.

Organizing frequently used routines and their data to an adjacent set of pages frequently improves performance because it improves the locality of reference. When a process calls one of these functions, the function might already be in memory because of its proximity to the other frequently used functions. Similarly, grouping interrelated functions improves locality of references. For example, if every call to the function foo() results in a call to the function bar(), place these functions on the same page. Tools like cflow(1), tcov(1), prof(1) and gprof(1) are useful in determining code coverage and profiling.

Isolate related functionality to its own shared object. The standard C library has historically been built containing many unrelated functions. Only rarely, for example, will any single executable use everything in this library. Because of widespread use, determining what set of functions are really the most frequently used is also somewhat difficult. In contrast, when designing a shared object from scratch, maintain only related functions within the shared object. This improves locality of reference and has the side effect of reducing the object's overall size.