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What is the purpose of swapping in virtual memory?

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What is the purpose of swapping in virtual memory?
posted Aug 5, 2015 by Mohammed Hussain

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1 Answer

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When the processes running on server / instance attempt to allocate more memory than your system has available, the kernel begins to swap memory pages to and from the disk.

This is done in order to free up sufficient physical memory to meet the RAM allocation requirements of the requester.

Virtual Memory swapping is an “expensive” activity in terms of its impact on overall system performance. If processes on your system regularly attempt to allocate more than the available physical RAM, you may experience drastic increases in web site response times and loss of execution speed.

Unfortunately only two solutions exist - either optimize your applications to utilize memory more efficiently, or add more physical RAM to the system.

answer Dec 18, 2015 by Manikandan J
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+3 votes

also please explain Virtual Memory Can Slow Down Performance why and how?

+1 vote

I have few questions about Cache Memory

In my system "free -h" command gave me below output,

      total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:   7.6G        2.1G        1.5G         46M        4.0G        4.8G
Swap:  1.6G         28M        1.6G

1. Why "Cache Memory" is required inside the main memory?

As far as i know "Cache Memory" is different than the main memory(RAM), It is very costly and it is very faster, Please Correct me if i am wrong.

2. Before 1 hour this cache memory was 3 GB and then it is increased by 1 GB?

Please note that I din't start/run any new processes

3. Till what limit i can start new processes/application?

I mean as per free -h command output,

free memory = 1.5 GB, Cache memory = 4 GB and Swap memory = 1.6 GB

can i start new application up to (1.5 + 1.6) GB or (1.5 + 1.6 + 4) GB`?

4. Can i set/configure this cache memory value?

If yes, then how to?

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