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Linux Intermediate

What is Swap Space?

A portion of disk storage used as virtual memory when physical RAM is fully utilized.

Swap space extends available memory by using disk storage. When RAM is full, the kernel moves inactive memory pages to swap, freeing RAM for active processes. Swap can be a dedicated partition or a swap file.

While swap prevents out-of-memory crashes, disk access is much slower than RAM. The swappiness parameter (0-100) controls how aggressively the kernel uses swap.

Related Terms

ACL (Access Control List)
An extension to standard Linux file permissions that allows setting fine-grained access rights for specific users and groups beyond owner/group/other.
SSH (Secure Shell)
A cryptographic network protocol for secure remote login and command execution over an unsecured network.
Xargs
A command that builds and executes commands from standard input, useful for processing lists of items.
Network Namespace
A Linux kernel feature that provides isolated network stacks with independent interfaces, routing tables, and firewall rules.
Cron Job
A scheduled task in Unix-like systems that runs automatically at specified times or intervals.
Ulimit
A command that sets or displays resource limits for user processes, such as maximum open files or memory usage.
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