Swapping Or Paging On Linux And Unix?

Howdy,

Here's a question that gets asked a lot, and has a relatively simple answer to go with it: On Unix and/or Linux, what's the difference between paging and swapping?

It's a relevant question, given that the terms are used almost interchangeably these days. Even in most Linux or Unix monitoring commands, the issue can become confused. Consider our previous posts on free memory graphing on Unix and graphing out paging statistics on Linux. They're both showing approximately the same thing, but one of them is using the terminology in a not-totally-correct sense.

The good news is you only need to understand one thing about each (which is also a common thread) in order to understand what the terms "really" mean. This can be a great help when you're trying to determine the cause of a system issue, like a big slow-down. Of course, since the terms are mixed up a lot, it's a good rule of thumb to assume that any problem with "paging" or "swapping" may be a problem with either. Depending upon who's asking, they could mean one thing or the other. As in public speaking, it's always a good idea to know your audience ;)

The main difference between paging and swapping (on both Linux and Unix; all flavors, as far as I know) is this:

1. Swapping: This occurs when an entire process ( sometimes consisting of multiple parts like a read-only text segment, writable data segment and, more often nowadays, writable stack segment ) gets transferred to disk from physical memory or is read back into physical memory from the disk.

2. Paging: This occurs when part of a process ( a page, or a segment, of a process ) gets transferred to disk from physical memory or is read back into physical memory from disk. Paging also requires a MMU (Memory Management Unit) and a CPU capable of handling requests from it. This is just a side note, and slightly outside the scope of the definition. It really doesn't even make a difference any more since I haven't seen an OS without paging capability in years, and most dedicated Unix/Linux servers have had the latent capability for even longer.

Tomorrow, we'll begin looking at a real-life examples of determining a system issue highlighted by excessive paging (or is it swapping?). For today, we'll keep it abstract.

To wrap up, on today's system's (The year now being 2008 - Just dating this in case it gets read 2 years from now and I'm totally off-base by then ;) there's almost no such thing as swapping. Paging occurs normally and, if you do see actual heavy swapping, it's generally an indication of a problem with memory or disk (Except in situations where you have large applications - like an Oracle database, for instance - that hoard lots of Virtual Memory Address (VMA) space and cause the system to swap naturally). In somewhat contrast, if your system is paging heavily, but not swapping, your issue is most likely with CPU or memory. Memory is often mistakenly assumed to be the culprit in most situations because both swapping and paging involve writing to, and reading from, memory. However, it should always be taken into account what other component of the OS is doing the work to make that activity possible, or maybe even necessary.

One last thing to remember is that either of these situations ( excessive swapping, excessive paging or both ) could be indicators of either memory, CPU or disk issues. They could also point to a problem with your network subsystem or any number of things. The generic explanations/answers in the previous paragraph assume a relative norm. In reality, you have to look at the situation in the context of the problem you're facing on the system that's having the issue and work from there.

We'll run down some quick and easy real-life troubleshooting starting tomorrow.

Until then, best wishes :)

, Mike

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