Suppose your process starts up, and allocates some memory with malloc(). The allocator will then give part of a memory page to your process. The OS then updates the corresponding page table entry (PTE), marking the virtual page as valid. If you then try to modify part of that page, only then will the OS actually allocate a physical page, and so the PTE will now be marked as resident. In addition, since the memory has been modi?ed, the PTE will be marked dirty.

If the OS ever needs to evict this page, then, since it is dirty, the OS has to copy that page to disk (i.e. it swaps it, or performs paging). The PTE for the page is still marked valid but is now marked non-resident.

And, if we ever touch that page again (i.e. if we try to read or write it), the OS may have to evict some other page in order to bring our page back into physical memory. One obvious implication of this is that pagefaults are slow to resolve, since disk accesses are performed.

Therefore one possible optimization is for the OS to write dirty pages to disk constantly as an idle background task. Then, when it is time to evict those pages, they will be clean, and the OS won't have to write them to disk. This makes the eviction process much faster.