Discussion
Which of these is not a benefit of virtual memory?
Answer: C
Correct answer: It makes memory access faster than direct physical addressing
Virtual memory does not make memory access faster. It adds a translation step and the possibility of a page fault, so an individual access is at best no faster and at worst thousands of times slower. Its benefits lie elsewhere. Those benefits are real and considerable. A program may be larger than physical memory, since only the pages in use need be resident. More processes fit in memory at once, so CPU utilisation and throughput rise. And less input and output is needed at start-up, since only the parts of a program actually executed are ever read from disk. It also simplifies programming, by removing the need for the overlay schemes programmers once wrote by hand. The costs are the translation overhead - mitigated by the TLB - the memory occupied by page tables, and the risk of thrashing if processes are given too few frames. Where speed of a single access is what matters, virtual memory is a cost rather than a benefit.
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