ISR Ballooning Study
Srikant Varadan, Guarav Mehta, and Gautam Kedia

Memory ballooning is a mechanism by which a VM monitor can coerce the
guest OS into evicting non-essential pages from memory in order to
reduce the size of the memory image on the guest, and enable faster
migration of the VM across physical hosts. We observed that there is a
crucial tradeoff between the size of the ballooned image and the
working sets of the processes resident in physical memory. We have
developed a heuristic that relies on an estimate of the hard page
fault rate on the guest OS. The approach is to periodically sample the
page fault rate, and allow the VMM to perform ballooning to the extent
to which it observes a certain change in the page fault rate. The aim
of this study is to evaluate our approach against the naive approach
to memory ballooning with respect to (a) the size of the reduced
memory image and (b) the impact on performance of interactive
workloads upon resuming the VM.