Question

What role does the amount of memory in your computer play in memory management? Do you think the amount of memory that Microsoft recommends is adequate for most users? Why or why not?

Answer 1

Each process which is running in the computer requires certain amount of memory to operate and execute. Memory management is a process which runs on OS and performs the task of assigning memories to the processes that are executing.

A process cannot share its memory space with another process and hence each one has its own allocated space. If all the available memory space on the RAM is currently in use by the currently running processes, then if any new process comes up and asks for the memory. The OS cannot assign the memory to it immediately. The new process must wait untill the currently executing processes gets completed.

OS uses the concept called swapping for memory management.Swapping is a mechanism in which a process can be swapped temporarily out of main memory to secondary storage (disk) and make that memory available to other processes.

Memory management handles fragmentation. As the processes are continuously getting loaded to getting removed from the memory, there are small chuncks of memory spaces that gets left out and they are not contiguous at times. As a result, the memory is left unused. This problem is called fragmentation.

Does the amount of memory that Microsoft recommends is adequate for most users?

In most cases, the amount of memory that microsoft recommends turns out to be inadequate for users due to below reasons-

1. Microsoft recommends the RAM size based on the number of applications installed in the PC currently and predicts the number of software and application alongwith their sizes based on the usual past trend of users using windows. But, in most cases uses in will install applications that requires large amount of memory to run and excessive amount of page swapping leading to degradation of system performance.

2. Sometimes some buggy applications cause memory leak.