Can someone explain how this works?
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 😎
I’ve used my floppy in a few swap spaces myself if ya know what I mean…
All you need to know is that RAM is all about being extremely fast.
Swap is disk space set aside to be used as virtual Ram (part of your disk become RAM ) for when you have no more real ram. It’s useless on modern computers because RAMs are at worst of worst 100 times faster than the fastest SSD. If you have no ram it’s just best to crash the OS than making it slow down to a crawl or freeze.
This person use their Google drive as swap which make it even far more useless because even the slowest ssd is probably faster than the best commercial internet connection even with a perfect latency.
In short, it’s extremely cursed.
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 ͡°) .
