Comments on: Linux add a swap file howto

By: luckyrams

luckyrams — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:08:48 +0000

Thanks! I’m newbie to Linux, It helped me in time.

By: Primoz

Primoz — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:37:21 +0000

Hi!
First I must say thanks for a great how to.
And secondly, I’m referencing it in Arch Linux wiki how to create swap file.
Hope you agree with it.
If not please contact me.
Link: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HOWTO_Create_swap_file

By: Gen2ly

Gen2ly — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 02:39:25 +0000

Set swap priority:

• Swapiness is the priority of input/output for swap. To look the current value:
cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

To change the swap priority (lower value means less swapping):
sysctl vm.swappiness=10

To have this value set at boot add it to /etc/sysctl.conf
vm.swappiness=0

By: acidtoi

acidtoi — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:12:26 +0000

hi,
i’m about to install ubuntu karmic on a new computer with thre sata hard drives.

I usually allocate a little more of current ram in swap partition (5 gigas) so I can safely hibernate, but on a post I read in FreeBSD forums there’s a link to FreeBSD manual where states there should be a swap partition for every disk, not just one swap for the whole system.

So, I know Linux is not *BSD but I wonder if the same is applicable here because installing a swap of 5 gigs in all three sata seems a waste of space to me!

cheers!

By: Alex

Alex — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 19:45:11 +0000

Thank you for the guide; I’d like to add another detail. In this line one may choose to use other units to make things more simple:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile1 bs=1024 count=524288

You can turn it into:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile1 bs=1M count=512

This means that the block size is 1 MB, so count=512 means “I need 512 megs”, there is no need to do any other calculations.

By: Mosab

Mosab — Wed, 07 May 2008 18:29:01 +0000

Thanks, I have been looking for the last step for months heh.

By: asdffdsa

asdffdsa — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 08:25:31 +0000

Thanks for the help. But how would I go about deleting this swapfile? Also, how does creating a swapfile this way differ from creating a separate partition for one? I only ask because I would like to have multiple installs of linux on my system, and I would like them to share the same swapfile.

Recently, I’ve been trying to create a swapfile partition and it’s not being recognized, so I’ve been having trouble.

By: some_guy

some_guy — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 02:35:28 +0000

If you don’t want to reboot the machine to enable the new swapfile, after step f) you can issue these commands:

swapoff -a
swapon -a

to first stop and then start all swaps in /etc/fstab

By: nixcraft

nixcraft — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 22:16:50 +0000

anon,

Thanks for heads up!

By: anon

anon — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 22:00:47 +0000

TYPO: vi /etc/fstatb
It should be fstab