GATE CS 2005 Q22 — Memory Management and Virtual Memory

Increasing the physical RAM (main memory) of a computer increases the number of page frames available to active processes. This improves performance due to the following reasons:

• Fewer Page Faults: With more physical frames available, a larger portion of a process's active address space (its working set) can reside in the RAM simultaneously. This significantly reduces the frequency of page replacements and disk I/O operations, thereby minimizing page faults and preventing thrashing.

Why the other options are incorrect:

• Option A: Virtual memory size is determined by the CPU's addressing capability (e.g., $2^{32}$ bytes for a 32-bit architecture) and the secondary storage swap space, not by the physical RAM size.
• Option B: Larger RAM capacity does not inherently mean the memory access speed (latency or clock frequency) is faster.
• Option D: Segmentation faults are logical errors caused by a program attempting to access restricted or invalid memory locations (e.g., dereferencing a null pointer). They are independent of the physical memory size.