Here are the steps needed to add a new SWAP partition to your Linux machine. This’ll allocate 2GB of space on your disk, and allow it to be used as RAM if your server is running low.
Allocate the space for SWAP
First, let’s create a 2GB file on the disk that’ll be used as SWAP space. You need to have this space available on your hard drive!
$ fallocate -l 2G /swapfile
$ chmod 600 /swapfile
Update: a reader pointed out it’s better to use dd to allocate space as mkswap also recommends this. Be careful with this, as a wrong command will overwrite your hard drive without prompting for confirmation!
From the mkswap man-page:
Note that a swap file must not contain any holes. Using cp(1) to create the file is not acceptable. Neither is use of fallocate(1) on file systems that support preallocated files, such as XFS or ext4, or on copy-on-write filesystems like btrfs. It is recommended to use dd(1) and /dev/zero in these cases. Please read notes from swapon(8) before adding a swap file to copy-on-write filesystems.
To create a 2GB file at /swapfile using dd, run this:
$ dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024 count=2024000 of=/swapfile
Mark the file as use for SWAP
Next up, we’ll have to explicitly mark that file to have the necessary layout to be used as a SWAP partition.
$ mkswap /swapfile
Activate the SWAP partition
Now, time to let the system use that 2GB file as the new SWAP space!
$ swapon /swapfile
Depending on your system load (or how urgent you’re adding new SWAP space), this may take a few seconds.
You can verify if the system has loaded this correctly as follows:
$ swapon --show
NAME TYPE SIZE USED PRIO
/swapfile file 2G 56.4M -2
The free utility, which shows the total amount of memory and the free memory, will also list your SWAP space:
$ free -h
total used free
Mem: 1.9G 1.1G 694M
Swap: 2.0G 68M 1.9G
Add the SWAP partition to /etc/fstab
To make sure the new SWAP partition is loaded on reboot, add this to your /etc/fstab line at the very bottom.
$ cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.backup
$ echo "/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0" >> /etc/fstab
Your /etc/fstab should now look similar to this, with your root partition and the SWAP partition included (and probably some other partitions, as that’ll depend on your distro).
$ cat /etc/fstab
LABEL=cloudimg-rootfs / ext4 defaults 0 0
LABEL=UEFI /boot/efi vfat defaults 0 0
/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0
To play it safe: reboot your machine and see if it works!
If it doesn’t, reboot in recovery mode and comment out (or remove) the last line in /etc/fstab, and reboot again.