Shared Memory

Definitions

1. A region of memory that is mapped into the address space of multiple processes simultaneously, enabling the fastest form of inter-process communication since no data copying is required — though it demands explicit synchronization (mutexes, semaphores) to prevent races.

   In plain English: A chunk of memory that multiple programs can read and write directly, allowing them to exchange data extremely fast.

   Example: "The video encoder and the streaming server communicate through shared memory to avoid copying 4K frames through a pipe."

Related Terms

• Message Passing
• IPC
• Marshalling
• Memory Segment
• Multi-Threading
• Named Pipe
• OS Thread
• Platform Channel
• Preemptive Scheduling
• Scheduler
• Spawning
• Time Slice
• Unix Socket
• XPC