You’ve finally configured every aspect of your Linux system. All of your devices function, and everything is configured just the way you like it. At least you think so, until you start running out of memory when you have heavy mathematical computations (Matlab or something) or lots of browser tabs open, with Youtube, simultaneously. You realize you should have specified a larger swap partition during your install. Does this mean you have to install again from scratch? Happily, no. Here’s how to set up some extra swap space on one of your existing partitions.

There’s always more than one way to maintain your Linux system. Instead of creating a swap file, you could instead resize and or reshuffle your partitions with parted or its graphical front end QtParted. However, resizing your partitions is a much more severe change than simply adding a file to one of them.

To start off, see how much swap space you already have. At a command line, type swapon -s (you might need to prepend /sbin/ if you’re not root). The command should produce a message that looks something like this:

[root@server] [~]# swapon -s
Filename       Type        Size    Used    Priority
/dev/md1       partition   4192888 4192880 -1

The numbers under “Size” and “Used” are in kilobytes. Uh oh. On this system we’ve used about all of our measly 4GB swap partition — and we’re not even running heavy data computation yet. We need an auxiliary swap file.

Let’s figure out where to put it. Running df -h from a command line should produce output something like this:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md2              65G   50G   12G  81%  /

The -h switch we used provided us with output in human readable sizes (mb/gb). Under the “Available” column we have approximately 12GB of free space on our root partition. Let’s steal 10GB of that for our auxiliary swap file. You might want more or less, depending on your memory needs, how much swap space you already have available, and how much free disk space you have. The general rule of thumb for swap size is that your total available swap space should be around double your RAM size. If you have additional partitions, and one of those is a better candidate than the / partition, feel free to use it instead.

You may have heard before that “everything is a file in Unix” Device files (like our /dev/hda1 partition) are a special type of file. What we’re about to do is create a plain-jane, non-special file, prepare it for “swapification,” and then tell Linux to use it when it runs out of space on its regular swap device (file).

A brief word of warning. Back up your important data before proceeding. If you carefully follow the steps below you should be fine, but it’s always better to be safe.

In order to create our supplementary swap file, we’re going to use the dd (data dump) command. You’ll need to become root to perform the next few steps. In a regular terminal type su – and enter your root password. When you’re ready, carefully type:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=10240

replacing 10240 (10gb) with the number of megabytes you want in your auxiliary swap file. if= and of= are short for infile and outfile. The /dev/zero device file will give us zeroes to be written to the output file. If you want this file on a different partition, say your /var partition, you would replace /swapfile with /var/swapfile

Now we have a file the size we want on disk, and we can prepare it for use as a swap partition. We’ll use the mkswap command to make our file swap-consumable for the Linux kernel. Again as root, carefully type:

mkswap /swapfile

To turn on our swap file, we run swapon /swapfile . Now when we run swapon -s we should see our existing swap partition and our new swapfile. Also, the free command should show an increase in total swap space.

But we’re still not done yet. If we reboot our machine now, our new swapfile won’t be active, and we’ll have to run swapon /swapfile again. In order to make things more permanent, we’ll need to edit our /etc/fstab file.

First, make a copy of the file. (You’ll see why shortly.) Something like this should do the trick:

cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bak

Now open /etc/fstab in your favorite text editor (vi, nano, et al.) and find a line about your swapfile that looks something like this:

/dev/md1     swap     swap    defaults        0 0

You’ll need another line like that underneath it pointing to your new swap file. Replace the first column with the location of your new swap file. For our example, the new line should look like this:

/swapfile     swap     swap    defaults        0 0

Save the file. Mistaken changes to /etc/fstab could render your system unbootable, so just to make sure you didn’t accidentally change anything else in /etc/fstab, run diff /etc/fstab.bak /etc/fstab to check for differences. That should output only the single line you added, with a “>” sign in front of it. If you see anything else in diff‘s output, edit /etc/fstab again, fix it, and run the above diff command again.

Use swapon -a command to make available all devices marked as ‘‘swap’’ devices in /etc/fstab.

[root@server] [~]# swapon -a

Congratulations! You should now have more swap space than you did before.

[root@server] [~]# swapon -s
Filename        Type        Size      Used    Priority
/dev/md1        partition   4192888   4192688    -1
/swapfile       file        10737418  3810400    -2

Was this an ideal solution? Hardly. Linux admins would call this a “dirty hack.” When swapping with your new auxiliary swap file your system will be working a little harder than when it’s swapping to a dedicated swap partition. In order to access the swapfile, the Linux kernel will have to first talk to the file system that the swapfile is on before it can get the information it wants from the swapfile itself. When swapping directly to a partition, the kernel doesn’t have to take this extra step.

In practical terms, there’s a minimal performance hit from this extra step. By the time you’ve run out of RAM and are beginning to swap, you’re already suffering a massive performance hit. After your original swap partition is full and you’re spilling into your auxiliary swap file, your system should be suffering badly enough that the added performance hit will be completely imperceptible.

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