Vahetusmälu

Vahetusmälu, also known as swap memory or paging file, is a temporary storage area on a computer's hard drive or solid-state drive (SSD) used to supplement the system's physical random access memory (RAM). When the RAM becomes full, the operating system moves inactive data from RAM to the swap memory, freeing up space for new data. This process is known as swapping or paging. When the data is needed again, it is moved back into RAM. The size and location of the swap memory can be configured by the user or set automatically by the operating system. Swap memory is crucial for multitasking and running resource-intensive applications, as it allows the system to handle more data than would fit in the available RAM alone. However, frequent swapping can lead to decreased performance, as accessing data from the swap memory is slower than accessing it from RAM. Therefore, it is important to ensure that the system has sufficient RAM to minimize the need for swapping.