Swap is a special area on your computer, which the operating system can use as additional RAM.
Starting with Ubuntu 17.04, the swap partition was replaced by a swap file. The main advantage of the swap file is easy resizing.
In the following example, we’ll extend the swap space available in the /swapfile from 4 GB to 8 GB.
-
- Turn off all swap processes
sudo swapoff -a
- Resize the swap
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1G count=8
if = input file
of = output file
bs = block size
count = multiplier of blocks - Make the file usable as swap
sudo mkswap /swapfile
- Activate the swap file
sudo swapon /swapfile
- Check the amount of swap available
grep SwapTotal /proc/meminfo
- Turn off all swap processes
In step 2, I got the following error:
DD: Memory Exhausted by Input Buffer of Size Bytes
This can be fixed by using this command instead:
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=2000
(2000 = 2GB)
Hi Bogdan,
thanks for the post. The changes appear not to be persistent with a reboot. How can we make them persistent?
Thanks
Hi Enrique,
Can you please add this line at the end of the /etc/fstab file?
/swapfile none swap sw 0 0
Please let me know if this works for you and I’ll update the article.
Thank you,
Bogdan