Managing Memory

The purpose of memory management is to optimize use of random access memory (RAM).

With virtual memory (VM), the operating system allocates a portion of a storage medium, usually the hard disk, to function as additional RAM.

The area of the hard disk used for virtual memory is called a swap file because it swaps (exchange) data, information, and instructions between memory and storage.

A page is the amount of data and program instructions that can swap at a given time.

Thus, the technique of swapping items between memory and storage often is called paging.