Can you stop memory from being swapped to disk?

Question

I was wondering if it was possible to prevent memory of a object (class or struct) from being swapped to disk?

Edit: As for why I\'ve been told some of the data I\'m

Answer 1

I am still not clear on why you want to do this. In the context of C#, you have to do two things: "pin" the memory so it cannot be relocated by garbage collection, and then lock it so that it doesn't get swapped out.

Here is a nice blog post that describes how to do the first part (pinning):

http://www.matthew-long.com/2005/10/18/memory-pinning/

Now you need the address and extent of the object to be able to invoke VirtualLock:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Aa366895

Note that VirtualLock only locks pages (units of 4K), so your memory area needs to be at least that large, and aligned to the start of a page. I am assuming that it needs to be invoked in an unsafe context, though I am not sure.

Previous posting on the topic: Prevent an object from being paged out (VirtualLock equivalent)

Another related blog post: http://geekswithblogs.net/robp/archive/2008/08/13/speedy-c-part-3-understanding-memory-references-pinned-objects-and.aspx