whats the differences and similarities between physical and virtual memory?

Answer 1

Physical memory is RAM chips that store data temporarily and can be worked on at a very fast rate.

Virtual memory is a file or partition on a hard drive that is used to shunt inactive parts of programs and data, in order to free up more physical memory to actually run programs in.

You cannot actually run programs in virtual memory - the program must be transferred to physical memory first.

When you switch off, the contents of physical memory are quickly lost, however the virtual memory file/partition is still readable. It is possible for programs to request that secure data never be cached in virtual memory.

Virtual memory can be vastly larger than physical memory. This is not neccessarily true but in practice it usually is.

Virtual memory can be used to 'apparently' increase the amount of physical memory you have. Physical memory can be used to create a temporary virtual hard drive.

Physical memory can be used to cache frequently accessed data on the hard drive, but there is no point to a virtual memory file/partition being used to cache frequently accessed data in physical memory.

Answer 2

Differences: Speed. Physical memory is far faster that virtual memory. Virtual memory is a space of your hard drive, actually appear as a file, but treated as part of memory. That is why virtual memory slower, they need to read from disk.


 

Answer 3

Operating System keeps content of RAM Memory on harddisk to have feeling that it has more RAM than currently available physical memory i.e. RAM. Storage area on Hard Disk is called Virtual Memory.

Answer 4

actual memory is memory this is stored interior the ram, this is your memory chips. digital memory is area this is reserved on your annoyingcontinual on your laptop to jot right down to whilst it runs out of exact memory. that's lots slower than actual memory.

Answer 5

physical is like really rembering it virtually rembering it is like a computer storing it there similar because they are both stored in like a brain basically

Answer 6

virtual memory i the memory used by programs or processes to do stuff.
physical is your Hard drive, to store music and music and more music.