Performance Evaluation Methodology

There are three choices for evaluating the different buffer management algorithms :

1. Direct Measurement : too computationally expensive
2. Analytical Modeling : cost-effective but could not model the different algorithms in sufficient detail
3. Simulation : This technique has been used in this paper for buffer management algorithms evaluation

Mainly two types of simulations are used :

1. Trace Driven Simulations - are driven by traces recorded from a real system. It gives more creditability and fine workload characterization.
2. Distribution Driven Simulations - in this events are generated by a random process with certain stochastic structure.
3. Hybrid Simulation - combines features of both the above models and it has been used by authors for performance evaluation.

A simulator for database systems had been used, which simulates query processing and maintains CPU, I/O devices, and memory usage.

Throughput has been measured as the average number of queries completed per second.