APPLICATION-LAYER MANAGED MEMORY CACHE

In order to prevent data thrashing and the resulting performance degradation, a computer system may maintain an application-layer cache space to more effectively use physical memory and, thus, significantly improve an application-memory hit ratio and reduce disk input-output operations. In particular, the computer system may maintain a managed memory cache that is separate from an operating system's default page cache. The managed memory cache may be managed according to predefined caching rules that are separate from rules used to manage the page cache. Moreover, at least one of the data entries in the managed memory cache may have a page size that is smaller than a minimum page size of the page cache. Furthermore, at least some of the data entries in the managed memory cache may have different page sizes and, more generally, different associated predefined caching rules.