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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

Chroot
A mechanism that changes the apparent root directory for a process and its children, creating an isolated filesystem view.
Journalctl
A command-line tool for querying and viewing logs collected by systemd's journal logging system.
Symbolic Link
A special file that acts as a shortcut pointing to another file or directory in the filesystem.
Sysfs (/sys)
A virtual filesystem that exports information about kernel subsystems, hardware devices, and device drivers in a structured hierarchy.
Crontab Syntax
The time specification format used in cron job scheduling, with five fields defining minute, hour, day of month, month, and day of week.
RAID
Redundant Array of Independent Disks — a technology combining multiple physical drives into a single unit for performance, redundancy, or both.
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