In this article I am going to talk about two things and both will try to explain in the simplest way possible to make it clear which are the RAM and SWAP Serving in Ubuntu, although this can be extended to all operating systems PC. For Windows the issue of SWAP is something different and also explain a bit how it works.
RAM and SWAP Serving in Ubuntu
The first thing I will explain is that it is the RAM, when we have a computer our information, whether programs or personal files, is stored in two main ways, one of which is the hard drive and a RAM. On the hard drive of your computer have Ubuntu, for instance, our programs and personal files, but the hard drive is just a "store" and to use all that we need is in the RAM memory of our computer, say, when we open a program such as a word processing program that is loaded into RAM to use it if we could not not use it. The text file you want to open is also loaded into RAM.
By default our computer, when we turn it on, and load a number of programs that we can use and this together with what we want to use can cause the RAM fills up until fully used, this was a really important problem years ago, when computers came with little RAM today is very common to buy a PC with 4 or 8 GB of RAM and is less important, but can also prove to be the case that it fills the RAM, just for that I will think SWAP.
The SWAP is a hard drive partition that we created when we installed Ubuntu, its size depends on us we wanted to put, it is usually advised that if your computer has less than 2GB of RAM, SWAP should be double the size and if we have more than 2GB of RAM the SWAP should be of equal size. That partition SWAP is like a RAM emergency, more or less, since when the RAM is full programs that we are not using will move to the SWAP for the computer is not slow, it's like an extension of RAM, so to speak. But the SWAP has a major drawback regarding the RAM is much slower, so it would be advisable not to use it too.
For Windows partition, SWAP is created when we installed it, but without knowing a file is created in the root of the hard disk that do often SWAP is called paging file sharing and usually a large file size, the equivalent of a SWAP partition in Ubuntu.
