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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

AppArmor
A Linux security module that restricts program capabilities using per-application profiles, simpler to configure than SELinux.
Firewalld
A dynamic firewall management tool for Linux that provides a D-Bus interface for managing firewall rules with zones.
Daemon
A background process that runs continuously on a system, typically providing services like web serving or logging.
Rsync
A fast, versatile file synchronization tool that efficiently transfers and syncs files between local and remote systems.
Curl
A versatile command-line tool for transferring data using various network protocols, commonly used for API testing.
SELinux
Security-Enhanced Linux — a mandatory access control system that confines programs to minimum required privileges beyond standard file permissions.
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