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With ________ pages other than the one demanded by a page fault are brought in.

User Galkin
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Final answer:

In memory management, when a page fault triggers additional pages to be loaded, this strategy is known as 'prepaging' or 'pre-loading.'

Step-by-step explanation:

The question refers to a concept in computer memory management, specifically to virtual memory and page replacement algorithms.

When it states 'With ________ pages other than the one demanded by a page fault are brought in,' it is asking to fill in the blank with a term that describes the strategy of preemptively loading more than one page into physical memory when a page fault occurs. The correct term to fill in the blank here is 'prepaging' or sometimes referred to as 'pre-loading'.

In computer systems, when a program tries to access data that is not in the main memory (RAM), a page fault occurs, triggering a sequence of events where the operating system loads the required data from the slower secondary storage, such as a hard disk or SSD, into RAM.

Precious time is spent in this process, so some paging algorithms bring in additional pages that are adjacent to the page causing the fault, anticipating that these pages will be needed soon. This strategy is based on the principle of locality, which suggests that pages near the one causing the fault are more likely to be accessed in the near future.

The effectiveness of this strategy largely depends on the particular program's access patterns. If the assumed locality is incorrect, this can lead to unnecessary data being loaded into memory, which can lower overall system performance by using memory resources for unneeded data.

User Brad Folkens
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