<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<page xmlns="http://projectmallard.org/1.0/" type="topic" style="task" id="memory-map-what" xml:lang="gnome-system-monitor-pt">

  <info>
    <revision pkgversion="3.11" date="2014-01-28" status="candidate"/>
    <link type="guide" xref="index#memory" group="memory"/>

    <include xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude" href="legal.xml"/>

    <credit type="author copyright">
      <name>Phil Bull</name>
      <email>philbull@gmail.com</email>
      <years>2011</years>
    </credit>

    <credit type="author copyright">
      <name>Michael Hill</name>
      <email>mdhillca@gmail.com</email>
      <years>2011, 2014</years>
    </credit>

    <desc>The memory map of a process can help diagnose certain memory
    issues.</desc>
  </info>

  <title>What is a memory map?</title>

  <p><gui>Virtual memory</gui> is a representation of the combined
  <gui>physical memory</gui> and <link xref="mem-swap">swap space</link> in a
  system. It enables running processes to access <em>more</em> than the
  existing physical memory by <gui>mapping</gui> locations in physical memory
  to files on disk.</p>

  <p>When a program is launched, the system assigns it a unique process ID
  (PID) and its <em>instructions</em> and <em>data</em> are loaded into memory
  in <em>pages</em>. The page table of each process maps the correspondence
  between its pages in virtual memory and their location in physical memory.
  The <gui>memory map</gui> displays the total virtual memory use of the
  process, and can be used to determine the memory cost of running a single or
  multiple instances of the program, to ensure the use of the correct shared
  libraries, to see the results of adjusting various performance tuning
  parameters the program may have, or to diagnose issues such as memory
  leaks.</p>

  <p>If multiple copies of a program are running, the instructions (or
  <em>text</em>) of the program only need to be loaded once into physical
  memory. Each time a new instance of the program is launched (as a unique
  process with its own virtual memory pages), its page table maps the location
  of the text in virtual memory to those instructions in the original real
  memory location. In addition, any dynamic shared libraries used by the
  process appear as distinct in virtual memory, but are shared references to a
  single copy of the library's text segment in real memory. When accounting for
  the total memory use of a process, it is important to note that the cost of
  shared libraries loaded into memory can be spread across all processes
  currently using them.</p>

  <p>When the system needs more pages of memory than are available, some of the
  existing pages will be <em>paged out</em> or written to the <gui>swap
  space</gui>. Text pages are flagged read-execute in memory and don't need to
  be written to swap since they can be re-loaded from their original location
  on disk. Data pages have read-write permissions, and if modified when in
  memory, they are labeled <em>dirty</em>, and when designated for swapping,
  must be paged out.  When a page in swap space is required by a running
  process, it needs to be swapped back in before use, perhaps causing another
  page to be paged out.</p>

</page>
