What is the role of memory management in an operating system?

Memory management is a crucial function of an operating system that involves tracking, allocating, and deallocating memory for various programs and processes. This aspect of the operating system is essential for efficient performance and stability. It ensures that each program has the necessary memory space to operate, prevents memory leaks, and promotes the effective use of available memory resources.

By tracking memory usage, the operating system can allocate appropriate amounts of memory to each running process, thereby optimizing the overall system performance. Additionally, memory management is responsible for implementing memory protection, which prevents one process from interfering with the memory allocated to another process, thus promoting system security and reliability.

While displaying files on the screen pertains more to user interface management and organizing system files relates to file system management, these functions do not encapsulate the critical responsibilities associated with memory management. Similarly, managing network connections is handled by other subsystems within the operating system, separate from memory management functions.