Subject: Operating Systems

Topic: Memory Management

Difficulty: High

Swapping is a mechanism in which a process can be swapped temporarily out of main memory (or move) to secondary storage (disk) and make that memory available to other processes. At some later time, the system swaps back the process from the secondary storage to main memory.

Though performance is usually affected by swapping process but it helps in running multiple and big processes in parallel and that's the reason Swapping is also known as a technique for memory compaction.

The total time taken by swapping process includes the time it takes to move the entire process to a secondary disk and then to copy the process back to memory, as well as the time the process takes to regain main memory.

Let us assume that the user process is of size 2048KB and on a standard hard disk where swapping will take place has a data transfer rate around 1 MB per second. The actual transfer of the 1000K process to or from memory will take

2048KB / 1024KB per second
    = 2 seconds
    = 2000 milliseconds

Now considering in and out time, it will take complete 4000 milliseconds plus other overhead where the process competes to regain main memory.