How to avoid paging of memory for a process

To avoid paging the programs / Process should lock the memory using mlock system calls during startup

The mlock and mlockall system calls tell the system to lock to a specified memory range, and to not allow that memory to be paged. This means that once the physical page has been allocated to the page table entry, references to that page will not fault again.

There are two groups of mlock system calls available. The mlock and munlock calls lock and unlock a specific range of addresses. The mlockall and munlockall calls lock or unlock the entire program space.

Use of the mlock calls should be examined carefully and used with caution. If the application is large, or if it has a large data domain, the mlock calls can cause thrashing if the system cannot allocate memory for other tasks. If the application is entering a time sensitive region of code, an mlockall call prior to entering, followed by munlockall can reduce paging while in the critical section. Similarly, mlock can be used on a data region that is relatively static or that will grow slowly but needs to be accessed without page faulting.

Use of mlock will not guarantee that the program will experience no page faults. It is used to ensure that the data will stay in memory, but can not ensure that it will stay in the same page. Other functions such as move_pages and memory compactors can move data around despite the mlock.

Important Note : Always use mlock with care. Using it excessively can lead to an out of memory (OOM) error. Do not just put an mlockall call at the start of your application. It is recommended that only the data and text of the real-time portion of the application be locked

mlock is controlled by the ulimit parameter " max locked memory " and you can set the same by using below mentioned command 

# ulimit -l  1024

We can monitor the usage of locked memory in /proc/meminfo