Techie:Techie Main/Linux/Increasing Swap Space

Increasing swap partition size

Preferable if that's an option but not detailed here

| a good article on linux.com] about this.

It boils down to

Check existing swap space
- /sbin/swapon -s
Decide where to put swap file (assume /extraswap for this example)
- df -m
Backup important data just in case
Swap to root user
- sudo su -
Create file initially full of zeros
- dd if=/dev/zero of=/extraswap bs=1M count=512
Prepare file as a swap file
- mkswap /extraswap
Turn on our swap file
- swapon /extraswap
Check it's ok
- /sbin/swapon -s
  - should include /extraswap in list
- free
  - should show expected increase in swap space
add /extraswap to /etc/fstab so that it's still there when we reboot
- cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.mybackup
- add following line to /etc/fstab underneath existing swap entries
  - /extraswap none swap sw 0 0