Question on memory info in Activity Monitor

[Feek]

I've just had a shufti in Activity Monitor at the System Memory page and I see that there's a Virtual Memory column, but the figures in there seem very high!

I assume that OS X virtual memory doesn't work the same way that it does in Windows, but what does it mean, how does it work, especially seeing as I've got plenty of real memory free? It indicates Firefox is using over a gig of virtual memory, but that can't be right with all the free RAM I've got can it?

I just like to know what's going on and why!

 

[Deleted member 651465]

It would seem that the more memory you have, the higher the amount of virtual memory each application will use.

For example, notice the browser I'm using also has >1GB of virtual memory usage, and that's with 8GB (soon to be 16GB) installed.

For more on OS X memory management, check out this

 

[Feek]

Interesting read, thanks