A procedure used to move data from physical memory to disk when physical memory is nearly exhausted.
The action take by the swapper daemon when the system is extremely short of physical memory needed for use by processes. Swapping can place a heavy load on the CPU and disk I/O subsystems.
A technique that the UNIX kernel uses to clean up physical memory. The kernel moves entire processes from memory to disk and then reassigns the memory to some other function. Processes that have been idle for more than a certain period may be removed from memory to save space. Swapping is also used to satisfy extreme memory shortages. When the system is extremely short of memory, active processes may be "swapped out."
The reaction of the operating system to insufficient real memory: swapping occurs when too many tasks are perceived to be competing for limited resources. It is the physical movement of an entire task (e.g., all real memory pages of an address space may be moved at one time from main storage to auxiliary storage).
The moving of pages (i.e., 512 byte chunks of information) between physical memory and disk.
Another method of managing memory. Entire processes are swapped as needed to keep the active processes in memory. Swapping can add delays if large processes are swapped frequently.
Using part of the hard drive as memory when RAM is full. See Virtual Memory.