how does freeing up storage space make your computer faster?
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It can, in the days of spinning disks the more data that was written to the disk the less efficient the disks got when seeking. The only circumstance where you really see a performance impact is if you have a full drive with a lot of fragments that is trying to utilize a lot of swap. Swap is already far slower than memory, you can compound that problem by having the swap file on a full disk. Server administrators (hey, that was me!) used to put the swap on its own volume so that if some knob-head filled up the disks you would still have a performant system.
Oh right, swap is like…something you would typically store in RAM but since RAM is expensive and you have a limited supply, you put those things onto disk. You don’t *need* to use swap, but I have run systems without it that would need to write more into memory than available memory and that data was just lost into the ether never to be seen again. Don’t ask, it was a very particular application on a very particular system and it should never have been designed that way.
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