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Virtual memory combines active RAM and inactive memory on DASD [a] to form a large range of contiguous addresses.. In computing, virtual memory, or virtual storage, [b] is a memory management technique that provides an "idealized abstraction of the storage resources that are actually available on a given machine" [3] which "creates the illusion to users of a very large (main) memory".
A modern computer operating system usually uses virtual memory to provide separate address spaces or separate regions of a single address space, called user space and kernel space. [1] [a] Primarily, this separation serves to provide memory protection and hardware protection from malicious or errant software behaviour.
The virtual memory is the memory space as seen from a process; this space is often split into pages of a fixed size (in paged memory), or less commonly into segments of variable sizes (in segmented memory). The page table, generally stored in main memory, keeps track of where the virtual pages are stored in the physical memory. This method uses ...
Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows Me use a similar file, and the settings for it are located under Control Panel → System → Performance tab → Virtual Memory. Windows automatically sets the size of the page file to start at 1.5× the size of physical memory, and expand up to 3× physical memory if necessary.
Physical memory can contain pages belonging to many processes. Pages can be held on disk if seldom used, or if physical memory is full. In the diagram above, some pages are not in physical memory. A page table is a data structure used by a virtual memory system in a computer to store mappings between virtual addresses and physical addresses.
By reducing the I/O activity caused by paging requests, virtual memory compression can produce overall performance improvements. The degree of performance improvement depends on a variety of factors, including the availability of any compression co-processors, spare bandwidth on the CPU, speed of the I/O channel, speed of the physical memory, and the compressibility of the physical memory ...
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If needed, contents of the computer memory can be transferred to storage; a common way of doing this is through a memory management technique called virtual memory. Modern computer memory is implemented as semiconductor memory, [5] [6] where data is stored within memory cells built from MOS transistors and other components on an integrated ...