What is virtual memory? What is the effect of insufficient virtual memory on my PC?

Virtual memory is in the properties of a computer.

Categories: Computer Network >> Operating System Failures.

Analysis: Virtual memory uses hard disk space as memory to make up for the lack of RAM space in the computer. When the actual RAM is full (in fact, before the RAM is full), the virtual memory is created on the hard disk.

When the physical memory is used up, the virtual memory manager selects the low-priority portion of the memory that has not been used recently and writes it to the swap file. This process is hidden from the application, which treats the virtual memory as the same as the actual memory.

Each application running under Windows NT is allocated 4 GB of its own virtual address space (2 GB for the application and 2 GB for the operating system).

The problem with using virtual memory is that the speed at which the hard drive can be read and written is much slower than the actual RAM can be read or written. This is the reason why the program runs slowly when the NT system does not have enough memory.

Virtual memory is an active file that is cross-linked with file data. It is one of the windows directory""file, which is constantly expanding and shrinking automatically.

In terms of speed, the CPU has the fastest L1 and L2 caches, followed by memory, and the hard drive again. But virtual memory uses space from hard drives, so why should we use the slowest hard drive as virtual memory? Because all the programs running in the computer need to go through the memory to execute, if the programs executed are large or numerous, it will cause us to only have a pitiful 256m 512m memory exhausted.

In order to solve this problem, Windows uses virtual memory technology, that is, a part of the hard disk space is used as memory.

Set the virtual memory manually.

In the default state, the system is allowed to manage the virtual memory, but the management method of the system's default settings is usually conservative, which will cause the page file to be discontinuous during automatic adjustment, and reduce the read and write efficiency, and the work efficiency is not high, so there will often be a prompt like "insufficient memory", so let's set it up by ourselves.

Right-click on the "My Computer" icon on the desktop and select the "Properties" option in the context menu that appears to open the "System Properties" window. Click on the "Advanced" tab in the window, and a dialog box for advanced settings appears.

Click the "Settings" button in the "Performance" area and select the "Advanced" tab in the "Performance Options" window that appears to open its dialog box.

In this dialog box, you can see the area about virtual memory, click the "Change" button to enter the "Virtual Memory" setting window. Select a partition with a large free capacity, check the box before "Custom size", fill in the specific values in the "Initial size" and "Maximum" columns, then click the "Set OK" button, and finally restart the computer to make the virtual memory settings take effect.

If a computer lacks random-access memory (RAM) that is required to run programs or operations, Windows uses virtual memory to compensate.

Virtual memory combines your computer's RAM with the temporary space on your hard drive. When RAM is running slowly, virtual memory moves data from RAM into a space called a paging file. Moving data in and out of a paging file frees up RAM so your computer can do its job.

The more RAM a computer has, the faster the program will run. If your computer's speed is slowed down due to a lack of RAM, you can try increasing the virtual memory to compensate. But computers can read data from RAM much faster than from hard drives, so increasing RAM is a better way to do it.

If we have enough memory, there is really no need to use virtual memory, and reading from the hard disk is not as fast as reading data from RAM.

Traditionally, many of the core features of Windows, as well as some third-party software, require the use of paging files, and if we disable all paging files, then some third-party software may encounter an error of running out of virtual memory, such as Photoshop. Therefore, no matter how large the memory, if you want to use this kind of software, you need to turn on virtual memory.

In fact, Windows does not use paging files when virtual memory is not needed, so even if virtual memory is turned off, you will not get any performance improvement.

Move the paging file to another disk with a large space to save space on the system disk and reduce disk fragmentation

Right-click on "Computer" and click on "Properties", and in the page that opens, click on Advanced System Settings on the left.

In the window that opens, click on the "Settings" button in the Performance section and find the "Advanced" tab.

Click the "Change" button, in the "Virtual Memory" window that opens, uncheck the box before "Automatically manage paging file size for all drives", then select "No paging file", click the "Settings" button to make the settings take effect, so that the paging files in the system disk are deleted.

Select another disk of the system disk, check the size of the system management, click the "Settings" button, click "OK", and restart the computer as prompted to make the settings take effect.