Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2006 / ia / Paper 5 / 7 / a / iii / Solution

Choose CLOCK for page replacement in a conventional operating system. Good temporal locality makes recency valuable, and CLOCK page replacement captures it reasonably well using cheap reference flags. FIFO page replacement ignores accesses after a page arrives, so it can evict a hot page. Exact LRU replacement has a stronger recency rule but recording and maintaining the order on every ordinary memory access is usually too costly. This is a practical cost-versus-hit-rate choice, not a theorem that CLOCK page replacement minimizes faults on every reference sequence.