Additional swap space (RH)

Swap needed to be increased to 8GB from 4GB on a RHEL 5 system. All hard drive space was already allocated, so I had to create a swap file (/files0/swapfile in this example) instead of a swap partition.

$ free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 8177384 4098900 4078484 0 133220 3671700 -/+ buffers/cache: 293980 7883404 Swap: 4192912 0 4192912

Procedure

Create the 4GB swap file.

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/files0/swapfile bs=1024 count=4194304 4194304+0 records in 4194304+0 records out 4294967296 bytes (4.3 GB) copied, 36.1759 seconds, 119 MB/s

Setup the swap file.

# mkswap /files0/swapfile Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 4294963 kB

Enable the swap file immediately.

# swapon /files0/swap file

Enable the swap file after reboot.

Add the following to /etc/fstab:

/files0/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0

Confirm the swap file has been added to swap.

$ free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 8177384 8058892 118492 0 116668 7534592 -/+ buffers/cache: 407632 7769752 Swap: 8387208 0 8387208

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