What Is A Swap File And Where Is It Located?
There is a swap file on each machine. It is a portion of the hard drive set aside to supplement RAM, or physical memory. The swap file is also known as virtual memory. Usually, the swap file is used as a RAM overflow, if you will. When there isn’t enough RAM to run an application, or applications, the machine will swap between RAM and the swap file. Since accessing the hard drive is much slower than RAM, performance begins to degrade. When a large portion of swap is needed, it can cripple or crash a machine.
