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13That's the old concept. The original motivation for virtual memory was a form of memory management to provide an address space larger than physical memory. But that was when memory was low-density and very expensive. Nowadays the primary reason for using virtual memory is for process security.– sawdustCommented Jan 10, 2017 at 8:35
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2"Now how is it increasing the memory?". It doesn't. The application isn't aware of the system's physical memory it's only aware of the virtual memory which is the reason when an application complains about not having enough memory it's talking about virtual memory and not physical memory– RamhoundCommented Jan 10, 2017 at 12:01
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2Keep in mind that virtual memory systems are pretty smart. If n processes have the same read-only page, all n processes can use the same one page of physical memory.– Eric LippertCommented Jan 10, 2017 at 12:22
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67Don't think of virtual memory as fooling anything. Memory is the abstract ability to store and retrieve data. Virtual memory provides an implementation for that abstraction. That some part of that abstraction is backed by RAM and some is backed by disk is an implementation detail of the abstraction.– Eric LippertCommented Jan 10, 2017 at 12:24
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4@HagenvonEitzen Not sure how memory is "always" on disk... aside from pages originally read from disk, unless a page is swapped out its contents may never be on disk, and this is especially true for pages which are pinned in memory e.g. due to being critical to kernel functionality.– MichaelCommented Jan 11, 2017 at 15:48
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