Increasing Swap Space on Ubuntu

No worries, we can definitely walk through the steps to increase your swap file size without removing it first!

Step 1: Check Current Swap Size

Before we make any changes, let’s check your current swap file size. Open a terminal and run:

sudo swapon --show

This will display the current swap file and its size.

Step 2: Increase Swap File Size

To increase the size of the swap file, you can use the `fallocate` command. For example, if you want to increase your swap file to 4G, here’s how to do it:

sudo fallocate -l 4G /swapfile

If `fallocate` doesn’t work for any reason, you can use `dd` instead:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1G count=4

This will create a new swap file with a size of 4GB and overwrite your existing one.

Step 3: Make Changes Recognized by the System

After resizing the file, you need to set the correct permissions:

sudo chmod 600 /swapfile

Now, we need to mark it as swap space:

sudo mkswap /swapfile

Finally, you can activate the new swap space:

sudo swapon /swapfile

To ensure these changes persist after a reboot, make sure your /etc/fstab file has the following line:

/swapfile none swap sw 0 0

Step 4: Verify Changes

Once you’ve done all that, you can verify the new swap size by running:

sudo swapon --show

Now you should see your updated swap size!

Precautions

It’s pretty safe to do this, but just to be cautious:

• Make sure you’re not running processes that heavily depend on swap while you’re doing this.
• If your system has limited RAM, consider closing some applications temporarily.
• Always keep a backup of important data, just in case something goes wrong!

And that’s it! Your system should now have more swap space to handle those million Chrome tabs. Good luck!