What is SWAP usage?

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Frost_

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Jul 12, 2014
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hello so i got a gaming pc a month ago with 16GB ram and i recently installed a program to monitor my memory usage,and then i saw this SWAP usage,i heard that when your actual RAM gets full, memory that you don't need right now gets copied to the swap ram on your hard drive.is it true?my SWAP usage right now is like 8.1GB out of 22.3GB.i thought it's supposed to be a temporary but why is the usage of SWAP is high even though i got like free 10GB RAM left
 
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laviniuc
that's how swap works, yes. basically the os allocates a portion of the hdd as ram and uses it if you ask it for ram > capacity. that;s the theory at least.

in practice the process is more complex and the values you're seeing are normal, especially if you haven't restarted in a long time.

what it does, is when it sees you haven't changed some data on the ram in a very long time it will move it to swap preemptively for when you're gonna ask it for ram. or when you have a game started, it will eat up ram, forcing programs to swap. when the game closes it won't automatically bring them back from swap to ram unless the other programs are needed.
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laviniuc

laviniuc

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Nov 29, 2013
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that's how swap works, yes. basically the os allocates a portion of the hdd as ram and uses it if you ask it for ram > capacity. that;s the theory at least.

in practice the process is more complex and the values you're seeing are normal, especially if you haven't restarted in a long time.

what it does, is when it sees you haven't changed some data on the ram in a very long time it will move it to swap preemptively for when you're gonna ask it for ram. or when you have a game started, it will eat up ram, forcing programs to swap. when the game closes it won't automatically bring them back from swap to ram unless the other programs are needed.
 
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