Perhaps many of you have heard of this term , most of you already know it, but for those newbies who still don't know what I'm talking about, I'll tell you a little about swapping.
Swap , or virtual memory, is the space that uses the HDD instead of a memory module.
In other words , applications use RAM and its availability to run and work on the computer; when there are few applications running on the system, they are managed with the available RAM.
Now what happens when the opposite is true, if applications need a lot of RAM or there is simply no more memory available? This is where Swap comes in.
Swap comes into use when real memory runs out ; the system copies part of the contents of RAM into the swap space in order to perform other tasks.
One of the main disadvantages of using this system is that the system will become slower, since the data transfer speed between the RAM and the HDD is vastly different and it all depends on your hardware.
Although in SDD this changes radically since there is a better data transfer.
Speed ​​matters here. While RAM transfers information in nanoseconds , an SSD accesses data in microseconds, whereas a regular hard drive accesses data in milliseconds . This means that RAM is 1000 times faster than an SSD and 100.000 times faster than a standard hard drive.
When is it necessary to use the Swap?
Although there is a lot of information on the internet, you will find two types: those who say that Swap is useless at this point and others who say that it is extremely useful.
Here comes a dilemma, the reality is that personally I have not had the need to use a swap partition, this because in my case I do not usually demand too much from my computers.
Although for everyone is different, from my part to this day I have never crashed the system and I have not suffered because it slows down due to lack of RAM memory, it has happened to me that I notice slowness, but it has been due because my hard drive already had problems and I had to change it.
But the questions they pose are :
- ¿How much should be the size of the exchange?
- ¿Swap must be twice the size of RAM or should it be half the size of the RAM?
Since both are linked, I think that by common sense we can deduce what should be done.
If you have a computer with 16 GB of RAM your Swap would be 32 GB or 8GB, the reality is that none, by common sense when accessing 8 GB of memory on your HDD takes you around 2 min onwards, seeing the table of transfer speed described above is not consistent.
Now , if you have more than 8GB of RAM , only 2GB of swap is enough ; using more doesn't make sense.
Now , if you have 6 GB or less, it is recommended that you use 1 GB to 2 GB.
If you use video editing tasks, renders or to play titles that require something considerable, the healthiest and best thing is to increase our RAM memory and only have our 2GB of Swap.
Finally, it is up to you to choose how much disk space you will dedicate to Swap, as I mentioned, personally I have never saturated my system so it is also part of your way of using your computer to have several applications open if not you have in use.