What is this 6.3GB of hard disk space allocated as "Swap"?

Question

I installed Ubuntu in dual boot, so I have one partition for Windows, and another for Ubuntu. However, when I check the partitions I see that I have 6.3GB of space formatted as Linux swap. I do not know why I have that partition. Can I format it to use?

More information about swap can be found at Ubuntu swap FAQ – stumblebee Feb 28 '18 at 06:14 — stumblebee, Feb 28 '18 at 06:14

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 28 '18 at 05:17

Linux divides a memory into chunks of memory called pages. When your system needs more memory than you have available, the kernel swaps out less used pages and gives memory to the current application that needs more memory and also it is used to store pages that a application on startup that used only on startup and never used again.

A typical swap partition should be double the size of your memory.(However, The size we can give to swap entirely depends on your RAM and your working processes)

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 28 '18 at 05:06

0

Swap space is the Linux equivalent of a Windows page file. It's there for preventing out-of-memory situations.

answered Feb 28 '18 at 05:06

Thanks. however, does the swap space has to be that large. I only have about 50GB of my ssd for Ubuntu, and it already took more than 10% of the total space. – Tinh Lac Feb 28 '18 at 05:11

What is this 6.3GB of hard disk space allocated as "Swap"?

2 Answers2