Can someone explain how this works?
this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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In a nutshell (eli5) swap is sorta "very slow ram" which is actually just a section of your hard drive /SSD/some other bizarre medium. It is generally used to temporarily store information that might be needed later but would waste valuable "fast ram" which is your actual ram sticks.
What's going on here is this user mounted Google drive in a way that the operating system can interact more directly with it, and it appears to have a set amount of space. Because we've mounted Google Drive we can tell our operating system to use it as swap....very very slow silly swap, but swap nonetheless.
So that's exactly what they did, they told the operating system to set aside X amount of Google Drive for swap, and when looking at the resource monitor we can see the "swap" appears as "more ram".
Hope that helps, please ask if I confused you :)
Time to use my floppy as a swap space 😎
This brings back memories.
When I was in university, I worked in the computer services department (IT services for the campus). A social science prof down the hall would use a program called SPSS (Statistics Package for Social Sciences) to do various statistics on data sets.
It was available on two platforms: PC & VAX
The PC had about 4 MB of RAM. The VAX (a large centralized computer) had much more (not sure the amount, but I'm guessing around 256 MB at least). The data sets they were using would sometimes require more RAM to process than the PC had (even with swap space), and would give an "out of memory" error.
They always came down the hall and would ask us what to do. The answer was always the same, "Some combination of: get more RAM/swap space for the PC, shrink the data set, simplify the complexity of the query or run it on the VAX server."
They finally started saying, "We connect to VAX, get more memory?"
I don't know if they thought using telnet to connect to the VAX actually caused the local PC to gain RAM or not but it was an inside pun for the department for a couple of years ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) .