Can a 32-bit OS machine use up all 8GB RAM + 20GB page file?
Problem
What I understand about 32-bit OS is, the address is expressed in 32 bits, so at most the OS could use 232 = 4G memory space -- I assume the unit is bytes, so 4GB. Does this mean if any machine with a 32-bit OS (be it Windows or Unix) has more than 4GB total of RAM + page file on hard disk, for example 8GB RAM and 20GB page file, its memory will never be "used up"? By "used up" I mean that increasing RAM or page file won't help the performance; of course, it's always possible an application will keep requesting memory from the OS but failing. Similarly, if this 32-bit OS machine has 2GB RAM and 2GB page file, increasing the page file size won't help the performance. Is this true?
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Fix for: Can a 32-bit OS machine use up all 8GB RAM + 20GB page file?
What I understand about 32-bit OS is, the address is expressed in 32 bits, so at most the OS could use 2^32 = 4GB memory space The most that the process can address is 4GB. You are potentially confusing memory with address space. A process can have more memory than address space. That is perfectly legal and quite common in video processing and other memory intensive applications. A process can be allocated dozens of GB of memory and swap it into and out of the address space at will. Only 2 GB cā¦
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