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The Five-Minute Rule Ten Years Later, and
Other Computer Storage Rules of Thumb
January 1, 1997
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Download Document
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View Link
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BibTex
Authors

Goetz Graefe

Jim Gray
Publication Type
Inproceedings
Pages
8
Number
MSR-TR-97-33
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.
Copyright © 1997 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make
digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without
fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that
copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this
work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy
otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific
permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept, ACM Inc., fax +1 (212)
869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. The definitive version of this paper can be found at
ACM’s Digital Library –http://www.acm.org/dl/.

Abstract
Abstract
Simple economic and performance arguments suggest appropriate lifetimes for main memory
pages and suggest optimal page sizes. The fundamental tradeoffs are the prices and bandwidths
of RAMs and disks. The analysis indicates that with today’s technology, five minutes is a good
lifetime for randomly accessed pages, one minute is a good lifetime for two-pass sequentially
accessed pages, and 16 KB is a good size for index pages. These rules-of-thumb change in
predictable ways as technology ratios change. They also motivate the importance of the new
Kaps, Maps, Scans, and /Kaps, /Maps, /TBscan metrics.
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