The transfer of pages of data between a computer's main memory and an auxiliary memory. Princeton's WordNet 0. Yahoo Web Search Yahoo Settings. Sign In. Search query.
All Images Videos News. Local Shopping. Anytime Past day Past week Past month. About 25, search results. People also ask. Do you use a swap file? The swap file is used to handle modern Windows applications the kind downloaded from the Windows Store , moving them to the hard drive in some kind of hibernation state when not in use.
If you are a Linux user you have definitely heard about Linux Swap, but you may not know what it is exactly or have only superficial knowledge about it. Time to change that! I mention Linux swap and swappiness in almost every article on things to do after installing Linux. You know that Linux swap is somehow related to RAM and swappiness can affect your system performance.
It is time to explain what it is and how to use it in little more details. That is why when you install a Linux distribution, the installation wizard usually asks you to assign some space for the system and another for the swap. Using swap is a very useful way to extend the RAM because it provides the necessary additional memory when the RAM space has been exhausted and a process has to be continued. It is especially recommended when you have less than 1Gb of RAM.
Although in the end, everything depends on you. This is a question many novice users ask themselves when they begin to discover Linux. In fact, this will depend on the use and amount of RAM your computer has. Regarding the use, there are processes and applications that really use a lot of memory, for example, Google Chrome. However, most of the current equipment comes with at least 8Gb of RAM and that makes the swap process less necessary.
Nevertheless, having a swap space is desirable even if you have a lot of RAM. For example, usually, when your RAM gets full and the Linux kernel has no space to write into, your system will crash. On the other hand, if you have a swap space, it will be used by the Linux kernel and your system will keep working, though much slower. So, it is safer to have swap space.
Note: swap space has one disadvantage - it is much slower than RAM. So, adding a swap space will not make your computer faster, it will only help to overcome some limitations posed by RAM size.
I recommend that you create the swap partition during the installation of your Linux distribution. In general, these are the recommended sizes for the swap partition. Alternatively, you can create a Linux Swap File after the installation. The modern Linux Kernel allows Swapping to a swap file instead of a swap partition. A swap file has an advantage over a swap partition that you can change the size of your swap any time easily by changing a swap file size.
Note: this command is to create a 1Gb swap file. Replace 1G with the value you want. If you see the size of a swap file in the total column, you have done everything correctly. Swappiness is a property of the Linux Kernel to define how often the swap space will be used. As you know RAM is faster than a hard drive. So, every time you need to use swap, you will notice that some processes and applications will run slower. However, you can adjust the system to use much more RAM than swap.
This can help improve overall system performance. Normally, the default swappiness value is The smaller this value, the more of your RAM will be used. In order to apply the changes, you need to reboot the system. Usually, this setting is recommended when you have more than 4Gb of RAM. In conclusion, it is safer to have some swap space on your computer.
You can use either a swap partition or a swap file. The latter becomes more and more common. Linux swap is a technical concept but knowing how it works can improve the performance of the system.
Just play with the swappiness value. There are also many other things you can do to improve your Linux experience. A computer has a sufficient amount of physical memory but most of the time we need more so we swap some memory on disk. Swap space is a space on a hard disk that is a substitute for physical memory.
It is used as virtual memory which contains process memory images. Whenever our computer runs short of physical memory it uses its virtual memory and stores information in memory on disk. It is also called a swap file. Virtual memory is a combination of RAM and disk space that running processes can use. Swap space is the portion of virtual memory that is on the hard disk, used when RAM is full. Applications that are not used or are used less can be kept in a swap file.
Having sufficient swap files helps the system keep some physical memory free all the time. The space in physical memory which has been freed due to swap space can be used by OS for some other important tasks.
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