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The Coders Blog profile image Mohan Upadhyay
Mohan Upadhyay for The Coders Blog

Posted on • Originally published at thecodersblog.com on

How to enable swap in ubuntu and debian?

#linux
What is swap space?

Swap space in any operating system is amount of disk space reserve for moving inactive pages from RAM. Swap space are of two type dedicate swap or of swap files in linux OS. Here we will create a swap file for the linux system.

We assume that the system does have not swap partition for this guide.

Check if your system already exist swap partition.

Open the terminal, and enter the following command to check.

swapon --show
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Check free memory and disk. 
free h
 //or
 df -h
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If you have sufficient space in you hard-disk then lets continue.

Step:1 Make swap off 
swapoff /var/swapfile
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Step 2: Resize the swapfile

Here let us increase to 2GB (assuming existing one has 1GB space as given in the article)

dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/swapfile bs=1024k count=2000
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Step 3: Make swapfile usable 
mkswap /var/swapfile
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Step 4: Make swapon 
swapon /var/swapfile
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Step 5: Change permission to 0600 
chmod 0600 /var/swapfile
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Step 6: Verify the swapfile 
swapon -show
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Step 7: Make swap file permanent 
echo '/var/swapfile none swap sw 0 0' | tee -a /etc/fstab
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