Swap Space
Domain: Computer Systems
🎯 Motivation
Disk space used for virtual memory. When RAM is full, inactive data is swapped here.
📋 Concrete Example
Swap space: 8GB on SSD. When RAM fills up, the OS writes inactive memory pages to swap. Reading from swap is 100x slower than RAM, but it prevents crashes.
🔗 Analogy
Swap space is like an overflow storage room - when your desk (RAM) and backpack are full, you put items in the storage room (swap). Getting them back takes longer, but you do not lose anything.