A memory-mapped file contains the contents of a file in virtual memory and is an application’s logical address space. This mapping between a file and memory space enables an application, including multiple processes, to modify the file by reading and writing directly to the memory. Starting with the .NET Framework version 4, you can use managed code to access memory-mapped files in the same way that native Windows functions access memory-mapped files, as described in Managing Memory-Mapped Files in Win32 in the MSDN Library.
There are two types of memory-mapped files:
There are two types of memory-mapped files:
- Persisted memory-mapped files
Persisted files are memory-mapped files that are associated with a source file on a disk. When the last process has finished working with the file, the data is saved to the source file on the disk. These memory-mapped files are suitable for working with extremely large source files. The following illustration shows memory-mapped files that are persisted to disk. - Non-persisted memory-mapped files
Non-persisted files are memory-mapped files that are not associated with a file on a disk. When the last process has finished working with the file, the data is lost and the file is reclaimed by garbage collection. These files are suitable for creating shared memory for inter-process communications (IPC). The following illustration shows memory-mapped files that are not persisted to disk.
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