Property Page-reference strings can be used to evaluate page replacement policies. Usually one counts the number of page faults for a given reference string, page replacement policy, and number of pages. A fault-rate graph plots the number of page faults vs. the number of page frames. Fill up initial frames. Other analysis is given in Tanenbaum.
Anomalies can occur only in policies that lack the stack property or inclusion property .
Locality of Reference Experiments show that some pages are accessed more frequently than others. At each instance, a few pages are in active use, while others are unreferenced. A phase change occurs when the set of pages in active use changes. In practice, it is difficult to implement exactly. The page-fault frequency policy approximates the working set policy.