All memory is virtual memory in modern operating systems. It isn't inherently "slow", as the support for that is at the hardware level. You might be confusing this with disk swapping or Physical Address Extension. Disk swapping is a natural part of virtual memory management and can be minimized by having enough physical memory installed. Physical Address Extension is a way for 32 bit operating systems to use more than 4 GB of memory and that indeed will be slower than normal memory access. It however isn't needed in 64 bit operating systems for the foreseeable future...xx JPRacer xx wrote: ps: I think 32 bit version of Windows can use 4 gig for each process running but when doing this it's using virtual memory (slow) since it can't address more than 4 gig physical ram (but I can be wrong on this).
The subsystem that handles 32 bit apps in 64 bit Windows is itself 64 bit, so it doesn't need to do any extra trickery to give each 32 bit process all of the possible 4 GB of memory address space possible for 32 bit processes. edit : oh I see you were speaking of 32 bit Windows anyway. There there is the global limit of 4 GB for all processes in total. It can only be overcome on a per-application basis if they utilize the above mentioned PAE techniques. (Thus causing potential slowdowns.) yet another edit : It could all be more complicated than this, I was just told 32 bit Windows could in fact run several processes allocating over 4 GB in total. Naturally this would be very slow because of the amount of disk swapping involved.And thanks Bootsie for the update, of course!
