On 12/8/2010 11:42 PM, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
The page file can be larger than physical memory because it contains
memory "images" for multiple processes. However, all those "images" have
to map into the physically addressable memory -- so a process is likely
limited to physical memory, but you can have multiple processes adding
up to physical + pagefile in total.
Only those pages that are currently paged in need be mapped to physical
memory. The rest are not mapped to anything at all (other than a
location in the page file) -- once a page is paged out, it need not be
put back in its original page frame when it is paged in again.
Since a process need not have all its pages in physical memory
simultaneously, there is no reason to suppose that a single process
could not consume the entirety of the available virtual memory (minus
what is used by the operating system) on a 64-bit system (the same
cannot be said of a 32-bit system, where the total virtual memory
available may well be larger than the addressable space).
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
