sunilkumar kondeti

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what is swap space,how it is useful to us

arckane

Physical RAM may get full, so a space on the hard drive is used as "swap" for caching and reading back.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paging#Linux

onebuck

Hi,
Swap space is more than enough for understanding. Read and understand!

Shadow_7

Basically swap gives you options. Instead of the OS saying, no you cannot launch anymore apps, you don't have the RAM for it. Or just giving up and shutting down (like windows does, wink) when it runs out of resources. Swap gives you a sort of fake ram. And space for other things where none may otherwise be available. encrypted filesystems? compressed read-only media? You don't always need it, and if you do need it regularly, you might consider other system upgrades to manage that. But if you need it and don't have it, that's a bad thing. Windows has swap too, but when you're trying to be RAM, using a file on a filesystem that's slow as molasses creates a bottle neck that amplifies the need for swap. Sometimes beyond being useful in the first place.

man swapon
man swapoff
man mkswap

onebuck

Hi,

You have the option of a 'swap file' or a 'swap space'. Two different things.

BTW, M$ does support both. It's just their handler is not as sufficient or efficient as the GNU.