Paging

Definitions

1. A memory management scheme in which the OS divides virtual memory into fixed-size pages (typically 4 KB) and maps them to physical frames via a page table, allowing processes to use more memory than physically available by swapping infrequently used pages to disk. Also used colloquially to mean paginating query results.

   In plain English: The operating system's way of giving programs the illusion of more memory than the computer actually has by shuffling data between RAM and disk.

   Example: "The server started thrashing — it was paging so heavily that every request triggered a page fault and the disk became the bottleneck."

Related Terms

• IPC
• Kernel Space
• Malloc
• Memory Segment
• Memory Zeroing
• Stack Memory
• Virtual Address Space
• Virtual Memory