Does accessing data in virtual memory take about the same amount of time as accessing data on the hard-disk?

Answer 1

Pretty much. virtual memory is just a section of the hard drive that's being used as if it were ram, but physical ram is *much* faster. Anything being read or written to virtual memory is limited by the speed of the hard-drive.

Answer 2

NO! I am always amazed at the guesses that are submitted as answers on this question!
Virtual memory is called virtual because it is processed the same as RAM except it is stored on the hard drive. What this means is that the data has been read and compiled by the CPU and executes immediately without recompiling. In addition, the memory manager which handles storing and retrieving data from memory has top priority in the command stack. Also, the data that is stored as virtual memory on the drive is written contiguously so the read time is a fraction of normal file retrieval. Have you ever noticed that frequently retrieved data is faster after a couple of retrievals? This is because the memory manager attempts to predict what data will be needed and it continually is swapping RAM and Virtual memory to cache memory(the fastest) to give the best performance.
Memory management has evolved into a very smart sophisticated function. If you've been around computers a while, did you notice that 3rd party memory managers just aren't around any more?
Believe me, I can get as discussed with windows as anyone but memory management is some of Microsoft's best work.

Answer 3

Virtual memory is on the hard-disk, usually.

Answer 4

Virtual memory is much faster. It is generally smaller than a hard drive (therefore takes less time to search).
So why not always use virtual? Because when you lose power, you lose everything (unusally) in virtual memory.

Answer 5

virtual memory is on the hard-disk as well.

Answer 6

Yes. They are both on the HD

Answer 7

It should be faster because no mechanicals are involved.

Answer 8

yes because it is on the harddisk ...