Computer Memory

Learn about computer memory, virtual address space, and thrashing's impact on system performance.

A computer’s physical memory is shared among all the processes running on a system. If one process uses a lot of memory, the other processes will most likely be affected. But from a programmer’s perspective, we usually don’t have to bother about the memory used by other processes. This isolation of memory is because most operating systems today are virtual memory operating systems, which provide the illusion that a process has all the memory for itself. Each process has its own virtual address space.

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