This condition, known as thrashing, usually renders the computer unusable until some programs are closed or the machine is rebooted. In some cases, a computer with virtual memory support where the majority of the loaded data resides on the hard disk may run out of physical memory but not virtual memory, thus causing excessive paging. Because virtual memory does not need to be backed by physical memory, exhaustion of it is rare, and usually there are other limits imposed by the operating system on resource consumption.Īs predicted by Moore's law, the amount of physical memory in all computers has grown almost exponentially, although this is offset to some degree by programs and files themselves becoming larger. Virtual memory can be backed by physical RAM, a disk file via mmap (on Unix-derivatives) or MapViewOfFile (on Windows), or swap space, and the operating system can move virtual memory pages around as it needs. Modern operating systems provide virtual memory, in which processes are given a range of memory, but where the memory does not directly correspond to actual physical RAM. Physical memory was often a scarce resource, and when it was exhausted by applications such as those with Terminate and Stay Resident functionality, no further applications could be started until running applications were closed. Programs were allocated physical memory that they could use as they needed. Therefore, they would either fail immediately with an "out of memory" error message, or work as expected.Įarly operating systems such as MS-DOS lacked support for multitasking. Almost all modern programs expect to be able to allocate and deallocate memory freely at run-time, and tend to fail in uncontrolled ways (crash) when that expectation is not met older ones often allocated memory only once, checked whether they got enough to do all their work, and then expected no more to be forthcoming. Since the advent of virtual memory opened the door for the usage of swap space, the condition is less frequent. 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.
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