Ubuntu Linux: Create swap file
Written by Guillermo Garron
Date: 2013-01-22 19:40:13 00:00
Memory in Linux is can be increased by create swap space, it can be a special partition, or a file which will work as a swap file. We will cover now, how to create a swap file.
Create a swap file
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=512k
Where:
- bs=1024: Says that each block is made of 1024 bytes
- count=512K: Says that there will be 512K blocks, so, 512 Megabytes of swapfile.
You can change count to 1024K if you want 1 Gigabyte of swap, more than that is not really recommended.
Format the file as swap
sudo mkswap /swapfile
Enable the swap
sudo swapon /swapfile
Make it permanent
To make the swap space available after every boot, edit the /etc/fstab file and add this line.
/swapfile none swap sw 0 0
Set the permissions to the swap file
sudo chown root:root /swapfile
sudo chmod 0600 /swapfile