Enhancing image processing capability by memory compression

System resource limitation has been for a long time a great obstacle for memory-intensive applications, and especially for high resolution image processing applications. Memory, and RAM in particular, has a big impact on the performance of those applications. Many solutions to reduce the effects of memory lack have been proposed in the literature, and most of them need an important execution time due to the usage of disk as a virtual memory space. In this paper we propose the use of memory compression through a new technique, called CompCache. This technique introduces new level in the memory hierarchy and uses compression to store 'swapped out' pages in memory instead of sending them to disk. In this way, disk accesses are reduced and by consequence application's speed is augmented. This technique improves greatly the performance of memoryintensive applications; particularly we focus on image processing. We evaluate the effects of CompCache on several benchmarks, implement suitable compression algorithms and show the results and the interactions with the operating system kernel when CompCache is used to manage the virtual memory.