This brief tutorial shows students and new users how to add swap space on Ubuntu 18.04 | 16.04.
Swap space is a location on the system’s disk drive that is used when the system’s physical memory (RAM) is full. When this happens, pages in this systems’ RAM that are inactive are moved to a swap space to make room for active pages.
You can either have a swap file or dedicated swap partition on the system’s disk.
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If you don’t already a swap file or want to create one, follow the steps below:
View Current Swapfile
To get started, first use the commands below to show your system’s current file swapfile settings.
sudo swapon --show
If you run the command above and the output is emptied, then your system doesn’t currently have a swapfile configured.
A system with swap space enabled and configure should display similar lines as below:
Output: NAME TYPE SIZE USED PRIO /swapfile file 1.4G 0B -2
If your system does have a swapfile but want to increase it, you can use the same steps below to increase it.
First, turn off the current swapfile by running the commands below:
sudo swapoff -v /swapfile
After turning it off, go and remove its entry from the /etc/fstab file.
Run the commands below to open the /etc/fstab file.
sudo nano /etc/fstab
Then comment out the highlighted line or remove it entirely.
# /etc/fstab: static file system information. # Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a # # / was on /dev/sda1 during installation UUID=b08fba81-8766-4c77-a965-05dd2224c125 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1 #/swapfile none swap sw 0 0
After that, save the file and exit.
When you’re done, run the commands below to delete current swapfile from your system.
sudo rm /swapfile
Creating New Swapfile
Now that the system’s current swapfile is removed, run the commands below to create a new one.
For this tutorial, we’re going to be creating a new swapfile of 2G space.
To do that, run the commands below:
sudo fallocate -l 2G /swapfile
Next, run the commands below to create a new swapfile.
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=2097152
You should see similar output as below when successful:
Output: 2097152+0 records in 2097152+0 records out 2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB, 2.0 GiB) copied, 7.10013 s, 302 MB/s
When you’re done, run the commands below to make sure only the root user is able to read and write to the swapfile.
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
Next, use Linux mkswap command utility to make that location on the disk a swapfile.
sudo mkswap /swapfile
You should then see a similar output as below:
Output: Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 2 GiB (2147479552 bytes) no label, UUID=cc5d179d-4c4c-497a-82f2-c1dc8eb68e26
Finally, activate the swapfile by running the commands below:
sudo swapon /swapfile
Next, go back to the /etc/fstab file and un-comment the line to enable the new swapfile or add a new line:
sudo nano /etc/fstab
Next, verify that the new swapfile is active by running the commands below:
sudo swapon --show
If everything is successful, you should see a new swapfile as below:
Output: NAME TYPE SIZE USED PRIO /swapfile file 2G 0B -2
That’s how one creates a new or increase a swapfile on Ubuntu
This post shows you how to create or increase a swapfile on Ubuntu 18.04 | 16.04 or other Linux systems. If you find any errors above, please use the comment form to report them.
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