Increase swap size

[philipluna66]

Hi I followed the tutorial and at the first comand dd if=/dev/zero of=/extra-swap bs=1M count=1024 I got permision denied So I couldnt do anything else Thanks for the tip anyway

[ZabiGG]

I should have mentioned it:

insert

sudo

before each command. The system will ask for your password the first time, but will not for the subsequent commands. So you'll need to enter it as follows from dd:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/extra-swap bs=1M count=1024

We’ll use the mkswap command to make our file swap-consumable for the Linux kernel.

sudo mkswap /extra-swap


To turn on the swap file run

sudo swapon /extra-swap


Now swapon -s will show the new file also.


And to make this swap on even after booting your machine you have to enter



sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.mybackup


That should work.

[philipluna66]

OK THANKS for that I did everything you said it went well actually to well i created 1.4gig I backed it up rebooted but my widget is now saying I only have 385 mb Is it there when I need it or did I not wait long enough for it to back up before rebooting. I think 1.4 gig is a little to much swap I thought about 800 - 1000 mb

[jeffus_il]

Monitor your swap space usage before making changes, you can know how much swap you really need. Use the system monitor->resource tab in Ubuntu.

[ZabiGG]

The swap you created is a supplementary swap. It is only used when needed and as much as needed.

[philipluna66]

Thanks I changed the sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/extra-swap bs=1M count=1024 from 1024 to 500 and I hope I have saved it OK THANKYOU FOR ALL YOURE HELP

[philipluna66]

Hi I eventually created 800mb of swap But I have just booted up again and my swap according to my widget is only 384mb as before. Is my extra swap there or do I have to create it every time???

[kerry_s]

philipluna66, if you installed swapd and made the change in swapd.conf you don't need to worry about swap, it will make a swap file 128mb at a time only when needed and remove it when no longer needed.

if your under the impression that swap can increase your performance your wrong, swap is slow, you want to use as less of it as possible, it's just emergency memory and not used all the time.

[Inxsible]

Wouldn't it have been easier to just increase swap using Gparted and resizing the appropriate partitions?

And I agree with kerry. The less the swap is used, the better it is