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Lack of Virtual Memory - confusion

Lack of Virtual Memory - confusion

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Asked by: Guest | Views: 183
Total answers/comments: 1
Guest [Entry]

"There is a lot of confusion among IT professionals about what virtual memory is and is not. It is something that is covered in an undergraduate operating systems course, but sadly most people graduate without ever understanding it.

Swap space has little to do with virtual memory, and is used when the computer runs out of physical memory. This is connected to disk space.

Virtual memory on the other hand is an abstract concept that allows you computer to ""address"" more memory than it actually has, but not to use more. Regardless of the swap size, a 32-bit machine can address and as such has 2^32 words of 32-bits each of virtual memory. Similarly for a 64-bit machine.

I would think that your ""helper"" program may be the culprit. Try uninstalling it and see if you still get the same error, because 2^32 is a BIG number.

To more specifically answer your question, virtual memory can not be sufficiently low, and as a result cause a machine to crash..."