Ubuntu

Cushioning The Main Memory

Asked by chintalvaady

Hi,
For some reasons i had not allocated swap space while installing ubuntu,but now i feel severe performance degradation.now is it possible for me to allocate swap space without reinstalling the O.S?

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W. Prins
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W. Prins (wprins) said : 		#1

Yes it is.

You can create a swap file on your filesystem and swap to that. How much memory have you got?

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chintalvaady (cmraghavendran) said : 		#2

well,My Main memory is 1GB and my hard disk is 80Gb...i use Ubuntu along wid windows as Dual boot.

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W. Prins (wprins) said : 		#3

OK, well for most things 1GB should be sufficient, but even so, here's how to create a new/extra swapfile:

1. Open a terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal)
2. Enter the following commands (or better yet, copy and paste them) one by one and press enter after each line:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1K count=1024K
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.backup
sudo echo "/swapfile none swap sw 0 0" >>/etc/fstab

3. Now you can either reboot, or enter the following command to activate the new swapspace without rebooting:
sudo swapon

The space should automatically be used/mounted on boot.

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Best W. Prins (wprins) said : 		#4

Forgot to say, the above will create a 1GB swapfile. Adjust the "count" value accordingly if you want a bigger or smaller swapfile. E.g. count = 512K will create a half gigabyte swapfile,a nd 2048K will create 2GB swapfile. Personally I wouldn't recommend any higher than 1GB to start with, and probably even 512MB will be fine.

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chintalvaady (cmraghavendran) said : 		#5

Thanks ByteJuggler, that solved my question.