Virtual Disk Memory

Tags

comp-arch

Is the memory-management technique of keeping only a small working set of a processes data in memory and keeping the remaining state in a special swap-space area on your hard disk.

This is valuable because for some large programs keeping them all in memory is impractical.

In the background the OS is constantly moving blocks of data between the memory and the swap space to maintain the illusion that the process has a much larger memory store than is actually physically available at any given point in time. The end result being that virtual memory is much larger, but not too much slower, than real memory.