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3. Reason for memory management

Every computer has a limited amount of memory. And so, like any limited resource, memory needs to be managed. This is the task of the memory manager (part of the operating system).

To run a process, it has to be loaded into main memory. So to run more than one process, they all have to be in main memory at the same time.

However, processes can write data into memory, so it's possible for one process to write over the memory holding a different process, causing it to become corrupted. The memory manager tries to prevent this from happening.

It does this by giving each process its own segment of memory and not allowing them to write over other segments.

The diagram below shows the memory manager loading several processes into main memory.

processes in memory

The memory manager is able to load and unload each process without affecting any of the others.

Challenge see if you can find out one extra fact on this topic that we haven't already told you

Click on this link: What is memory management