Top 10 List of Week 05

1. Thrashing?
   Thrashing in computing is an issue caused when virtual memory is in use. Thrashing happens when too many processes compete for inadequate memory resources. The most prominent reason is insufficient RAM or memory leakage. If your computer happen to slow down it is possible that thrashing is the culprit. To know what is thrashing, you must first be aware of swapping and page fault.

2. Swapping?
   Swapping is a form of memory management that stores memory in storage. Typically used when computer runs out of RAM. This could make you have more memory than your RAM capacity. Storage is however very slow in speed compared to RAM.

3. Page Fault?
   Page faults happen when a program tries to access memory that is not stored in physical RAM. It then notifies operating system and then uses secondary storage as mean of storing memory called swaps. This greatly affects performance as secondary storage is much slower than physical RAM. You should download buy more RAM to reduce page fault side effects.

4. Handling Thrashing
   Now that you know about thrashing you want to prevent thrashing as much as possible. To limit the effect of thrashing we can use local replacement algorithm. With Local replacement algorithm, if the process starts thrashing, it cannot steal frames from another process and cause the latter to thrash as well. There are techniques of thrash-handling in this link.

5. Using more than 4GB of ram in 32 bit machine
   Virtual memory could make computer have more memory than available RAM. But not in this case of 32 bit machine with more than 4GB of physical RAM. This is because 32 bit have only 2^32 individual addresses which is 4GB. So when you have more than 4GB of RAM installed, it is literally not accessible.

6. More RAM More Speed
   We all know that downloading adding more RAM increases your pc speed. More RAM equals more room for memory and more room for program running. Just make sure if you are planning to use more than 4GB of RAM that your machine is 64 bit.

7. Swap Partition in Windows
   When installing linux you have to manually add swap partition. As you can see the same does not apply to windows. So why don’t windows have swap partitions? Windows do have swap files so it is configured automatically.

8. Kernel Panic
   One of week 5 assignment is to set the lowest possible RAM allocation to make the machine barely boots. You might stumble accross the word kernel panic when booting with very low RAM. It is equivalent to the infamous Windows Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD).

9. What to Do When Kernel Panic
   When kernel panic happens do not be panic yourself. The most obvious thing you must do (in this case your virtual machines kernel panics) is to allocate more RAM. That is not the only case though. Read this article to know more.

10. Windows Memory Compression
    The word compressed is seen in the performance tab in windows task managers. Windows 10 has built-in memory compression feature. This feature reduces the use of disk swapping and is significantly faster than disk swapping.