Updating contents of certain memory pages in a virtual machine system is deferred until they are needed. Specifically, certain page update operations are deferred until the page is accessed for a load or store operation. Each page within the virtual machine system includes associated metadata, which includes a page signature characterizing the contents of a corresponding page or a reference to a page with canonical contents, and a flag that indicates the page needs to be updated before being accessed. The metadata may also include a flag to indicate that a backing store of the memory page has contents of a known content class. When such a memory page is mapped to a shared page with contents of that known content class, a flag in the metadata to indicate that contents of the memory page needs to be updated is not set.