Physical, Logical and swap memory

Physical memory

Physical memory (also known as random-access memory (RAM)) is a form of very fast, but volatile data storage.

Logical/Virtual memory

If you run out of physical memory, you use virtual memory, which stores the data in memory on disk. Virtual memory is a combination of RAM and disk space that running processes can use.

Swap space

Swap space is the portion of virtual memory that is on the hard disk, used when RAM is full.

Swap space is a space on hard disk which is a substitute of physical memory. Whenever our computer run short of physical memory it uses it’s virtual memory and stores information in memory on disk. Swap space helps the computer’s operating system in pretending that it have more RAM than it actually has. It is also called as swap file. This interchange of data between virtual memory and real memory is called as swapping and space on disk as “swap space”.

Here is a memory allocation process explanation with example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14347206/what-are-the-differences-between-virtual-memory-and-physical-memory#answer-48835605

Labels: Computer Architecture, Operating System