A page replacement algorithm is a mechanism used by an operating system to decide which page or pages in memory to evict to allocate space for incoming pages. It is an essential part of memory management in the virtual memory system. There are several page replacement algorithms, such as First In First Out (FIFO), Least Recently Used (LRU), Clock, and various other enhanced algorithms that take into account the working set of the process and page faults. The idea behind all these algorithms is to maximize the number of hits in the page cache while minimizing page faults and disk reads. The ultimate goal of any page replacement algorithm is to optimize the page fault rate and maximize system performance.
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