Virtual memory is a representation of the combined physical memory and swap space in a system. It enables running processes to access more than the existing physical memory by mapping locations in physical memory to files on disk.

When a program is launched, the system assigns it a unique process ID (PID) and its instructions and data are loaded into memory in pages. The page table of each process maps the correspondence between its pages in virtual memory and their location in physical memory. The memory map 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.

If multiple copies of a program are running, the instructions (or text) 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.

When the system needs more pages of memory than are available, some of the existing pages will be paged out or written to the swap space. 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 dirty, 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.