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      Creating A File Based Swap Partition
      Posted by Will Kruss on 05 April 2019 01:48 PM

      Need a swap partition on your VPS? you should use a file based swap partition. Learn the simple steps & do it yourself

      Use a file as a swap partition

      If you require a swap partition on your VPS, it's recommended to use a file based swap partition. To add one follow the below instructions.

      The following dd command example creates a swap file with the name “myswapfile” under /root directory with a size of 1024MB (1GB).

      # fallocate -l 2G /root/myswapfile
      
      # ls -l /root/myswapfile
      -rw-r--r--    1 root     root     1073741824 Aug 14 23:47 /root/myswapfile
      

      Change the permission of the swap file so that only root can access it.

      # chmod 600 /root/myswapfile
      

      Make this file as a swap file using mkswap command.

      # mkswap /root/myswapfile
      Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 1073737 kB
      

      Enable the newly created swapfile.

      # swapon /root/myswapfile
      

      To make this swap file available as a swap area even after the reboot, add the following line to the /etc/fstab file.

      # pico /etc/fstab
      /root/myswapfile               swap                    swap    defaults        0 0
      

      Verify whether the newly created swap area is available for your use.

      # swapon -s
      Filename                        Type            Size    Used    Priority
      /dev/sda2                       partition       4192956 0       -1
      /root/myswapfile                file            1048568 0       -2
      
      # free -k
                   total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
      Mem:       3082356    3022364      59992          0      52056    2646472
      -/+ buffers/cache:     323836    2758520
      Swap:      5241524          0    5241524
      

      Note: In the output of swapon -s command, the Type column will say “file” if the swap space is created from a swap file.

      If you don’t want to reboot to verify whether the system takes all the swap space mentioned in the /etc/fstab, you can do the following, which will disable and enable all the swap partition mentioned in the /etc/fstab

      # swapoff -a
      
      # swapon -a
      
       
      Single Cut/Paste version
       
      dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/myswapfile bs=1M count=1024
      chmod 600 /root/myswapfile
      mkswap /root/myswapfile
      swapon /root/myswapfile
      pico /etc/fstab

      /root/myswapfile swap swap defaults 0 0
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