[ale] how do I increase Linux swap file size?

Jeff Hubbs jhubbslist at att.net
Mon Jan 17 21:44:04 EST 2011


I keep seeing the 2xRAM rule of thumb applied even under insane amounts 
of RAM (>2GiB) - fact is, at much over 2-4GiB of RAM, your box will be 
well off into the weeds and unable to muster the disk I/O it would take 
to get itself sorted out again if you pushed it out into 50%-75% or more 
of your swap if you go by that rule. So when I see your 16GiB of swap, 
I'm foreseeing a frozen screen for maybe a week if you tried to use 
anywhere near that much.

Still, I've seen people make 64GiB of swap.  It's ridiculous.  If you 
honest-to-goodness HAVE to go there, you'd better have absolutely maxed 
out the motherboard on RAM and you need to have built not just one but 
at least two very-high-speed disk subsystems on separate buses JUST for 
swap (SSD; replace often).

- Jeff

On 1/17/11 5:21 PM, Ron Frazier wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> My main hard drive on this machine is partitioned as follows:
>
> 157 GB NTFS Windows Vista
> 97 GB EXT4 Linux (Ubuntu 10.04)
> 8 GB Linux swap
> 235 GB NTFS Windows Data (Also usable in Ubuntu)
>
> I normally keep my swap file set for 2X system ram.  I recently upgraded
> the computer to 8 GB of RAM, so I would like to non destructively shrink
> the last partition, while keeping it at the end of the disk.  Then, I
> want to increase the swap file to 16 GB.  Anybody know how to do that,
> preferably with a graphical utility, under Ubuntu?
>
> Thanks in advance for your help.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Ron
>



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