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Pages in the page cache modified after being brought in are called dirty pages. [5] Since non-dirty pages in the page cache have identical copies in secondary storage (e.g. hard disk drive or solid-state drive), discarding and reusing their space is much quicker than paging out application memory, and is often preferred over flushing the dirty pages into secondary storage and reusing their space.
In computer storage, a disk buffer (often ambiguously called a disk cache or a cache buffer) is the embedded memory in a hard disk drive (HDD) or solid-state drive (SSD) acting as a buffer between the rest of the computer and the physical hard disk platter or flash memory that is used for storage. [1]
The page cache in main memory, which is an example of disk cache, is managed by the operating system kernel. While the disk buffer, which is an integrated part of the hard disk drive or solid state drive, is sometimes misleadingly referred to as "disk cache", its main functions are write sequencing and read prefetching. Repeated cache hits are ...
Disk cache may refer to: Disk buffer , the small amount of RAM embedded on a hard disk drive, used to store the data going to and coming from the disk platters Page cache , the cache of data residing on a storage device, kept by the operating systems and stored in unused main memory
In effect, physical main memory becomes a cache for virtual memory, which is in general stored on disk in memory pages. Programs are allocated a certain number of pages as needed by the operating system. Active memory pages exist in both RAM and on disk. Inactive pages are removed from the cache and written to disk when the main memory becomes ...
A browser's cache stores temporary website files which allows the site to load faster in future sessions. This data will be recreated every time you visit the webpage, though at times it can become corrupted. Clearing the cache deletes these files and fixes problems like outdated pages, websites freezing, and pages not loading or being ...
The "extra memory" can be used in the page cache to cache frequently used files and metadata, such as directory information, from secondary storage. If the processor and operating system support multiple virtual address spaces, the "extra memory" can be used to run more processes.
Similarly, a page frame is the smallest fixed-length contiguous block of physical memory into which memory pages are mapped by the operating system. [1] [2] [3] A transfer of pages between main memory and an auxiliary store, such as a hard disk drive, is referred to as paging or swapping. [4]