in a computer system having an operating system and a compressed main memory defining a physical memory and a real memory characterized as an amount of main memory as seen by a processor , and including a compressed memory hardware controller device for controlling processor access to the compressed main memory , there is provided a system and method for managing real memory usage comprising : a compressed memory device driver for receiving real memory usage information from the compressed memory hardware controller , the information including a characterization of the real memory usage state : and , a compression management subsystem for monitoring the memory usage and initiating memory allocation and memory recovery in accordance with the memory usage state , the subsystem including mechanism for adjusting memory usage thresholds for controlling memory state changes . such a system and method is implemented in software operating such that control of the real memory usage in the computer system is transparent to the operating system .