From the course: Linux Tips

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Working with swap

Working with swap - Linux Tutorial

From the course: Linux Tips

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Working with swap

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- [Instructor] Most of the time programs running on a system make use of the working memory, the RAM, to store pieces of information they need to access. RAM is very fast. And so storing and retrieving information there is quick. but there's a problem with RAM. There often isn't enough of it. On most systems, there's somewhere between four and 32 gigabytes of RAM installed. And when programs are competing for that limited space, there needs to be a way to resolve conflicts and allow sharing to occur. To manage this, we use a process called swapping, where pieces of data from active memory are temporarily moved to slower media, generally a hard drive or solid state drive, leaving that space in faster memory, free for a program that needs it more urgently. The details of what pages or frames of information and memory gets into disc storage are handled by the system, but we can choose how much space to make available on disk…

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