Find current swap space on the system
free -m
total used free shared buffers cachedMem: 16051 15570 481 0 707 12644
-/+ buffers/cache: 2218 13833
Swap: 8189 0 8189
Or
swapon -s
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/dev/sda2 partition 8385920 88 -1
Or
cat /proc/swaps
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/dev/sda2 partition 8385920 88 -1
Method 1 – Use Hard Drive Partition
If you have additional hard disk or space available in existing disk then create partition using fdisk command. Assume /dev/sdc1 is newly created partition
Setup newly created partition as swap area
mkswap /dev/sdc1
Enable swap partition
swapon /dev/sdc1
Add following line to /etc/fstab to available even after reboot
cat /etc/fstab
/dev/sdc1 swap swap defaults 0 0
Verify whether newly created swap space is available
swapon -s
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/dev/sda2 partition 8385920 88 -1
/dev/sdc1 partition 10234430 0 -2
Method 2 – Use a file for Additional swap space
If you does not have any additional disk then you can create a file on your system and use that for swap space
Create the swap file called ‘myswap’ using following command (file size in bytes=bs*count)
dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/myswap bs=1M count=2048
Change the permission of newly created file
chmod 755 /root/myswap
Make this file as a swap file
mkswap /root/myswap
Add following line to /etc/fstab to available even after reboot
cat /etc/fstab
/root/myswap swap swap defaults 0 0
Verify whether newly created swap space is available
swapon -s
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/dev/sda2 partition 8385920 88 -1
/root/myswap file 2097152 0 -2
