Memory Overcommitment
Memory overcommitment is a concept in computing that covers the assignment of more memory to virtual computing devices (or processes) than the physical machine they are hosted, or running on, actually has. This is possible because virtual machines (or processes) do not necessarily use as much memory at any one point as they are assigned, creating a buffer. If four virtual machines each have 1 GB of memory on a physical machine with 4 GB of memory, but those virtual machines are only ''using'' 500 MB, it is possible to create additional virtual machines that take advantage of the 500 MB each existing machine is leaving free. Memory swapping is then used to handle spikes in memory usage. The disadvantage of this approach is that memory swap files are slower to read from than 'actual' memory, which can lead to performance drops. Another disadvantage is that, when running out of real memory, the system is relying on the applications to not use the additional memory de ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Computing
Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computer, computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and the development of both computer hardware, hardware and software. Computing has scientific, engineering, mathematical, technological, and social aspects. Major computing disciplines include computer engineering, computer science, cybersecurity, data science, information systems, information technology, and software engineering. The term ''computing'' is also synonymous with counting and calculation, calculating. In earlier times, it was used in reference to the action performed by Mechanical computer, mechanical computing machines, and before that, to Computer (occupation), human computers. History The history of computing is longer than the history of computing hardware and includes the history of methods intended for pen and paper (or for chalk and slate) with or without the aid of tables. ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Random-access Memory
Random-access memory (RAM; ) is a form of Computer memory, electronic computer memory that can be read and changed in any order, typically used to store working Data (computing), data and machine code. A random-access memory device allows data items to be read (computer), read or written in almost the same amount of time irrespective of the physical location of data inside the memory, in contrast with other direct-access data storage media (such as hard disks and Magnetic tape data storage, magnetic tape), where the time required to read and write data items varies significantly depending on their physical locations on the recording medium, due to mechanical limitations such as media rotation speeds and arm movement. In today's technology, random-access memory takes the form of integrated circuit (IC) chips with MOSFET, MOS (metal–oxide–semiconductor) Memory cell (computing), memory cells. RAM is normally associated with Volatile memory, volatile types of memory where s ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Virtual Machine
In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization or emulator, emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide the functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized hardware, software, or a combination of the two. Virtual machines differ and are organized by their function, shown here: * ''System virtual machines'' (also called full virtualization VMs, or SysVMs) provide a substitute for a real machine. They provide the functionality needed to execute entire operating systems. A hypervisor uses native code, native execution to share and manage hardware, allowing for multiple environments that are isolated from one another yet exist on the same physical machine. Modern hypervisors use hardware-assisted virtualization, with virtualization-specific hardware features on the host CPUs providing assistance to hypervisors. * ''Process virtual machines'' are designed to execute computer programs ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Memory Swapping
In computer operating systems, memory paging is a memory management scheme that allows the physical memory used by a program to be non-contiguous. This also helps avoid the problem of memory fragmentation and requiring compaction to reduce fragmentation. Paging is often combined with the related technique of allocating and freeing ''page frames'' and storing pages on and retrieving them from secondary storage in order to allow the aggregate size of the address spaces to exceed the physical memory of the system. For historical reasons, this technique is sometimes referred to as ''swapping''. When combined with virtual memory, it is known as ''paged virtual memory''. In this scheme, the operating system retrieves data from secondary storage in blocks of the same size (pages). Paging is an important part of virtual memory implementations in modern operating systems, using secondary storage to let programs exceed the size of available physical memory. Hardware support is nece ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Out Of Memory
Out of memory (OOM) is an often undesired state of computer operation where no additional memory can be allocated for use by programs or the operating system. Such a system will be unable to load any additional programs, and since many programs may load additional data into memory during execution, these will cease to function correctly. This usually occurs because all available memory, including disk swap space, has been allocated. History Historically, the out-of-memory condition was more common than it is now, since early computers and operating systems were limited to small amounts of physical random-access memory (RAM) due to the inability of early processors to address large amounts of memory, as well as cost considerations. Since the advent of virtual memory opened the door for the usage of swap space, the condition is less frequent. Almost all modern programs expect to be able to allocate and deallocate memory freely at run-time, and tend to fail in uncontrolled ways ( ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Virtualization
In computing, virtualization (abbreviated v12n) is a series of technologies that allows dividing of physical computing resources into a series of virtual machines, operating systems, processes or containers. Virtualization began in the 1960s with IBM CP/CMS. The control program CP provided each user with a simulated stand-alone System/360 computer. In hardware virtualization, the '' host machine'' is the machine that is used by the virtualization and the ''guest machine'' is the virtual machine. The words ''host'' and ''guest'' are used to distinguish the software that runs on the physical machine from the software that runs on the virtual machine. The software or firmware that creates a virtual machine on the host hardware is called a '' hypervisor'' or ''virtual machine monitor''. Hardware virtualization is not the same as hardware emulation. Hardware-assisted virtualization facilitates building a virtual machine monitor and allows guest OSes to be run in isolation. Deskt ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Windows NT
Windows NT is a Proprietary software, proprietary Graphical user interface, graphical operating system produced by Microsoft as part of its Windows product line, the first version of which, Windows NT 3.1, was released on July 27, 1993. Originally made for the workstation, office, and Server (computing), server markets, the Windows NT line was made available to consumers with the release of Windows XP in 2001. The underlying technology of Windows NT continues to exist to this day with incremental changes and improvements, with the latest version of Windows based on Windows NT being Windows Server 2025 announced in 2024. The name "Windows NT" originally denoted the major technological advancements that it had introduced to the Windows product line, including eliminating the 16-bit computing, 16-bit memory access limitations of earlier Windows releases such as Windows 3.1 and the Windows 9x series. Each Windows release built on this technology is considered to be based on, if not a ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Linux Kernel
The Linux kernel is a Free and open-source software, free and open source Unix-like kernel (operating system), kernel that is used in many computer systems worldwide. The kernel was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU operating system (OS) which was created to be a free software, free replacement for Unix. Since the late 1990s, it has been included in many Linux distributions, operating system distributions, many of which are called Linux. One such Linux kernel operating system is Android (operating system), Android which is used in many mobile and embedded devices. Most of the kernel code is written in C (programming language), C as supported by the GNU compiler collection (GCC) which has extensions beyond standard C. The code also contains assembly language, assembly code for architecture-specific logic such as optimizing memory use and task execution. The kernel has a Modular programming, modular design such that modules can be inte ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Memory Ballooning
In computing, memory ballooning is a technique that is used to eliminate the need to overcommit host memory used by virtual machines (VMs) by letting each VM effectively "give back" unused pages of irtualmemory. To implement memory ballooning, the virtual machine's kernel implements a "balloon driver" that allocates unused memory within the VM's address space into a pool of memory (the "balloon"), which makes that memory unavailable to other processes on that VM. The balloon driver doesn't use the pool of memory; instead it tells the host operating system's hypervisor which memory addresses are in that pool (unused). The host operating system then unmaps physical memory from those memory pages (with no need to copy them to secondary storage). The released pages of physical memory return to the host machine's pool of available RAM, and the host machine can use them to keep other virtual machines in physical memory and/or to cache secondary storage. Depending on the amount of memo ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Virtual Machines
In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization or emulator, emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide the functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized hardware, software, or a combination of the two. Virtual machines differ and are organized by their function, shown here: * ''System virtual machines'' (also called full virtualization VMs, or SysVMs) provide a substitute for a real machine. They provide the functionality needed to execute entire operating systems. A hypervisor uses native code, native execution to share and manage hardware, allowing for multiple environments that are isolated from one another yet exist on the same physical machine. Modern hypervisors use hardware-assisted virtualization, with virtualization-specific hardware features on the host CPUs providing assistance to hypervisors. * ''Process virtual machines'' are designed to execute computer programs ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |