Whats are the disadvantages of swapping in operating system?

@rishi0922 • 21 Sep, 2010 Swapping is a mechanism in which a process can be swapped temporarily out of memory to a backing storage and then brought back into memory for continued execution.
The operating system copies as much data as possible into main memory, and leaves the rest on the disk. When the operating system needs data from the disk, it exchanges a portion of data in main memory with a portion of data on the disk.

I think this is the very good advantage in operating system..

@Leo • 21 Sep, 2010 At very practicle say is that swapping doesn't really have any disadvantage.

@Manish Goyal • 21 Sep, 2010 • 1 like I think it depends on efficiency of algorithm

If we consider demand paging then it may lead to increase in page faults

but if we consider page replacement algorithms then there will be less page faults

overall we should talk about disadvantage of algorithm we are using not swapping .

@Morningdot Hablu • 22 Sep, 2010 From the posts it looks like it is thrashing which is the process of using virtual memory.
Am i correct guys ?
It is right to say that there in no effective disadvantages of swapping.
The only disadvantage of swapping occurs if your system has to rely too heavily on virtual memory, you will notice a significant performance drop.
But this disadvantages doesn't considered in todays PC(which came with at least 1 or 2 GB RAM).

@Leo • 22 Sep, 2010

mohit007kumar00

From the posts it looks like it is thrashing which is the process of using virtual memory.
Am i correct guys ?
It is right to say that there in no effective disadvantages of swapping.
The only disadvantage of swapping occurs if your system has to rely too heavily on virtual memory, you will notice a significant performance drop.
But this disadvantages doesn't considered in todays PC(which came with at least 1 or 2 GB RAM).

I agree with you.

@Leon Lipschitz • 15 Aug, 2015 Question
If you activate page swopping is there not the disadvantage that if the power goes off you will loose all the information that you a r e working o

@pratap singh, upendra • 03 Sep, 2015

Leon Lipschitz

Question
If you activate page swopping is there not the disadvantage that if the power goes off you will loose all the information that you a r e working o

Of course, that is the limitation (not a disadvantage though)

@Durgesh Srivastava • 26 Jan, 2020

The disadvantage is that the current hardware may not be good enough to run other operating systems, resulting in more errors or slow startup times. The advantage of swapping operating systems is that you can experience different environments without having to exchange hardware .

@Swarup Pan • 11 Feb, 2020

When a number of processes run simultaneously in an Operating System its the OS who handles it preety good with its inbuilt mechanisms.

Suppose 2 processes are running simultaneously and as a user I want simultaneous output for both the processes. The OS starts executing a process and then for a moment it swaps the processes and starts executing the 2nd one. This swapping continues and simultaneously the outputs for the two processes are generated.