Patent ID: 8909845

Claim:
A computer-implemented method to identify candidate duplicate memory pages in a virtual environment, comprising: analyzing at least one memory page in memory, wherein the at least one memory page is associated with an application executing in a virtual machine; collecting information for the at least one memory page in memory when the at least one memory page is identified as being a candidate duplicate memory page, wherein the information identifies the application associated with the at least one memory page; generating a report that includes the collected information for the at least one memory page and information for at least one additional memory page logged by one or more additional entities; accessing the logged information to determine whether the one or more additional entities have identified an identical type of memory page as being a candidate duplicate memory page; populating a memory page queue with a plurality of candidate duplicate memory pages, the memory page queue including the at least one memory page and the at least one additional memory page; and upon determining that the one or more additional entities have identified an identical type of memory page as a candidate duplicate memory page, prioritizing an order of the plurality of candidate duplicate memory pages within the memory page queue, wherein the order of the plurality of candidate duplicate memory pages is based on the logged information in the report, and wherein prioritizing the order of the plurality of candidate duplicate memory pages includes placing a set of matching candidate memory pages ahead of one or more non-matching candidate memory pages in the memory queue; and scanning the plurality of candidate duplicate memory pages in the memory page queue according to the prioritized order of the memory pages.