Linux Swap File
For some unexplainable reason it annoyed me that most Linux distros use a swap partition instead of a swap file. Depending on your setup a swap file will be just as fast and will even allow you to suspend to disk. Here is how you do it.
Enter the following lines at the Terminal:
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap bs=1G count=X
sudo chown root:root /swap
sudo chmod 600 /swap
sudo mkswap /swap
sudo swapon /swap
Replace “X” in the first line with how many gigabytes you want your swap file to be (~1.5 times your amount of RAM is a good rough guess). Now add the line “/swap none swap sw 0 0
” to your /etc/fstab file.
If you already have a swap partition you can safely remove the corresponding line from /etc/fstab, sudo swapoff partition
, and then remove the swap partition completely with a tool like GParted.
If you get a error from dd
indicating you do not have enough RAM you can use sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap bs=1M count=X
instead.