Memory management

[jason s]

The act of managing computer memory. It involves providing ways to assign portions of memory to programs at their request, and freeing it when no longer needed. The management of the main memory is crucial to the computer system. Memory addresses used by a process are separated from actual physical addresses by Virtual memory. Virtual memory also increases the effectively available amount of RAM using disk swapping. Even the quality of the virtual memory manager can have a big impact on overall system performance.

[Shane Phillips]

That's absolutely true. It's one of the main components of a server hardware.

[jason s]

Manual memory management is where the programmer has direct control over when memory may be recycled. Usually this is done by direct calls to HEAP management functions for example-allocate or free in c, or by language construct that affect the STACK, such as local variables. Main feature of the manual memory manager that it provides the program a way so that it can say "Have this memory back, I've finished with it", the memory manager does not recycle any memory without any such instruction.