Patent ID: 7937543

Claim:
A method for automatically determining performance problems in a computer system including a memory system due to a metric indicating a current memory peak load in the computer system, the memory system being divided into portions and each portion including a plurality of subunits, characterized by the step of using a cyclic stealing algorithm for stealing memory portions if the portions were not referenced since a last cycle and writing the portions to a secondary memory device, with an extension for determining an age of memory portions, wherein the extension comprises the steps of: writing time stamps to a data storage that identify only when a last subunit of a subselection of the memory portions was processed by the stealing algorithm, wherein a current time of a current cycle and a preceding current time of a preceding cycle different than the current cycle are stored in respective entries of the data storage, for generating age information for the memory subunits; and calculating the metric based on average age calculations including differences between a respective one of the current time and a respective one of the preceding current time of one or more of the entries of the data storage.