- Working Set Size
In computing the working set size is the amount of memory needed to compute the answer to a problem. In any computing scenario, but especially
high performance computing where mistakes can be costly, this is a significant design-criteria for a given super computer system in order to ensure that the system performs as expected.When a program/
algorithm computes the answer to a problem it uses a set ofdata (input and intermediate data) to complete the work. For a given instance of a problem and program combination the size of this data set is theworking set . The Working Set Size (WSS) is then the size of the data set.The significance of this is that if the Working Set Size is larger than the available memory in a
virtual memory system then the memory manager must refer to the next level in the memory hierarchy (usuallyhard disk ) to perform a swap operation swapping some memory contents fromRAM tohard disk to enable the program to continue working on the problem. If this swapping goes on continuously the program is slowed down significantly. This phenomena is known as thrashing.
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