Systems, methods, and computer programs are disclosed for adaptive compression-based demand paging. Two or more compressed software image segments are stored in each of one or more memories. Each compressed software image segment corresponds to at least one software task and includes one or more pages that are compressed in accordance with a compression characteristic different from that of the other software image segments. If it is determined that a page request associated with an executing software task identifies a page that is not stored in the system memory, then a portion of the compressed software image segment containing the identified page is decompressed, and the decompressed page is stored in the system memory.