All About Swap Part 1: Introduction

"Although swap acts as an extension of system memory, there are several purposes swap space can serve within that descriptor.

"Extra "memory"

"In the classic scenario, swap space could be considered a last-resort for data before an application - or the entire system - crashes. How does it work? Let's pretend you have 1000MB of RAM, of which 800 is used. You now load a program that consumes 300MB of memory. In this simplistic scenario there is more data than memory available; therefore, approximately 100MB will be moved into swap. Is this inherently bad? It isn't ideal, but typical far better than having the system grind to an uncontrollable halt and forcing a shutdown."

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• Should You Use Twice the Amount of Ram as Swap Space?(Nov 19, 2008)
• Warning: Ubuntu/Arch Linux Slowdown? Check Your Swap(Nov 07, 2008)
• All About Linux Swap Space(Dec 05, 2007)
• Still Waiting for Swap Prefetch(Aug 06, 2007)
• Linux: Revisiting Swap Prefetch(Jul 13, 2007)
• The R Zone: Why Swap on Linux is Always Good, Even with Tons of RAM(Jan 18, 2006)