What is Swap Space?
Linux has the facility to divide its physical RAM into tiny chunks of memory called Pages. Swapping is a method by which a page of memory can be copied to the pre-configured space on the hard disk which is called Swap Space, to free that particular page of memory. Thus, the combination of physical memory and the swap space is the actual amount of virtual memory available.
Use of Swap Space:
Swapping is critical for two obvious reasons.
- First, if the system needs more memory than physically available memory, the kernel swaps out less utilized pages and provides memory to the current application(process) that requires the memory instantly
- Next, a significant number of pages utilized by an application or process during its initial phase may only be used for initialization and then be never used again. The system shall swap out those pages and free the memory for other applications(process) or even the disk cache.
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