A memory management technique used by modern operating systems that gives the illusion of a large, contiguous block of memory, even if the physical memory (RAM) is limited. It extends the available memory by using a portion of the hard drive or SSD (called the page file or swap space) to temporarily store data that is not currently being used in RAM. This allows systems to run larger applications or multitask more effectively, but may lead to slower performance when relying heavily on disk-based memory.
