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→Memory Swapping Configuration
== Memory Swapping Configuration ==
In an ideal world, computers would have enough physical memory to run as many applications concurrently as any user could ever need. Unfortunately, that day has yet to come and most computer systems quickly use up all the available memory. In this scenario, the operating system performs a task called ''swapping'' whereby data held in memory is written to a hard disk to make room for other data. When the data written to the swap space on the disk is needed, the operating system writes some other memory based data to the disk to make room, and then reads previously swapped data back into memory. Whilst this seems like an elegant solution to the problem of limited memory availability, it has the downside that disk drives work much more slowly than random access memory (RAM). the more an operating system has to swap memory, the slower it will run.
== Host-wide Virtual Machine Startup and Shutdown ==
