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

A running instance of a program, with its own memory space, process ID, and system resources.

A virtual filesystem in Linux that provides an interface to kernel data structures, exposing process and system information as files.

File Permissions

A security mechanism that controls who can read, write, or execute files and directories in Unix-like systems.

A versatile command-line tool for transferring data using various network protocols, commonly used for API testing.

A command-line utility for downloading files from the web, supporting HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP protocols.

A command-line utility for managing disk partition tables on Linux systems.

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