There are two types of memory pressure to consider - first, a system with too little physical RAM installed. When a system has too little RAM, the Virtual Memory Manager has an increased workload as it attempts to keep the most recently accessed virtual memory pages of processes in Physical RAM so that they can be quickly retrieved. Performance of both applications, and the overall system may suffer as a result of the increased paging to disk. Although the excessive paging is really a secondary symptom, it is the easiest symptom to detect. The second type of memory issue occurs when a process exhausts the available virtual memory. This is most commonly referred to as a memory leak. Most memory leaks are fairly easy to detect and are usually caused by software code defects. However, normal system workload can also cause a memory depletion - there is no real memory leak, however overall virtual memory usage continues to grow until the system experiences a shortage.
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