Introduction
One of the easiest way of increasing the responsiveness of your server and guarding against out of memory errors in your applications is to add some swap space. Swap is an area on a hard drive that has been designated as a place where the operating system can temporarily store data that it can no longer hold in RAM.Basically, this gives you the ability to increase the amount of information that your server can keep in its working "memory", with some caveats. The space on the hard drive will be used mainly when space in RAM is no longer sufficient for data.
The information written to disk will be slower than information kept in RAM, but the operating system will prefer to keep running application data in memory and use swap for the older data. Overall, having swap space as a fall back for when your system's RAM is depleted is a good safety net.
In this guide, we'll cover how to create and enable a swap file on an Ubuntu 14.04 server.
Check the System for Swap Information
Before we begin, we will take a look at our operating system to see if we already have some swap space available. We can have multiple swap files or swap partitions, but generally one should be enough.We can see if the system has any configured swap by typing:
sudo
swapon -sFilename
Type Size Used PriorityAnother, more familiar way of checking for swap space is with the
free utility, which shows us system
memory usage. We can see our current memory and swap usage in
Megabytes by typing:free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3953 154 3799 0 8 83
-/+ buffers/cache: 62 3890
Swap: 0
0 0
As you can see above, our total swap space in the system is "0".
This matches what we saw with the previous command.Check Available Space on the Hard Drive Partition
The typical way of allocating space for swap is to use a separate partition devoted to the task. However, altering the partitioning scheme is not always possible. We can just as easily create a swap file that resides on an existing partition.Before we do this, we should be aware of our current disk usage. We can get this information by typing:
df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vda 59G 1.3G 55G 3% /
none 4.0K 0 4.0K 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
udev 2.0G 12K 2.0G 1% /dev
tmpfs 396M 312K 396M 1% /run
none 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
none 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /run/shm
none 100M 0 100M 0% /run/userAs you can see on the first line, our hard drive partition has 55 Gigabytes available, so we have a huge amount of space to work with. This is on a fresh, medium-sized VPS instance, however, so your actual usage might be very different.
Although there are many opinions about the appropriate size of a swap space, it really depends on your personal preferences and your application requirements. Generally, an amount equal to or double the amount of RAM on your system is a good starting point.
Since my system has 4 Gigabytes of RAM, and doubling that would take a significant chunk of my disk space that I'm not willing to part with, I will create a swap space of 4 Gigabytes to match my system's RAM.
Create a Swap File
Now that we know our available hard drive space, we can go about creating a swap file within our filesystem.We will create a file called
swapfile
in our root (/) directory. The file must allocate the amount of space
we want for our swap file. There are two main ways of doing this:The Traditional, Slow Way
Traditionally, we would create a file with preallocated space by using thedd command. This versatile
disk utility writes from one location to another location.We can use this to write zeros to the file from a special device in Linux systems located at
/dev/zero
that just spits out as many zeros as requested.We specify the file size by using a combination of
bs
for block size and count for the number
of blocks. What we assign to each parameter is almost entirely
arbitrary. What matters is what the product of multiplying them turns
out to be.For instance, in our example, we're looking to create a 4 Gigabyte file. We can do this by specifying a block size of 1 Gigabyte and a count of 4:
sudo
dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1G count=44+0 records in4+0 records out4294967296
bytes (4.3 GB) copied, 18.6227 s, 231 MB/sof
(which stands for output file) to the wrong location.We can see that 4 Gigabytes have been allocated by typing:
ls -lh /swapfile
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4.0G Apr 28 17:15 /swapfileIf you've completed the command above, you may notice that it took quite a while. In fact, you can see in the output that it took my system 18 seconds to create the file. That is because it has to write 4 Gigabytes of zeros to the disk.
If you want to learn how to create the file faster, remove the file and follow along below:
sudo
rm /swapfileThe Faster Way
The quicker way of getting the same file is by using thefallocate
program. This command creates a file of a preallocated size
instantly, without actually having to write dummy contents.We can create a 4 Gigabyte file by typing:
sudo
fallocate -l 4G /swapfilels -lh /swapfile
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4.0G Apr 28 17:19 /swapfileAs you can see, our file is created with the correct amount of space set aside.
Enabling the Swap File
Right now, our file is created, but our system does not know that this is supposed to be used for swap. We need to tell our system to format this file as swap and then enable it.Before we do that though, we need to adjust the permissions on our file so that it isn't readable by anyone besides root. Allowing other users to read or write to this file would be a huge security risk. We can lock down the permissions by typing:
sudo
chmod 600 /swapfilels -lh /swapfile
-rw------- 1 root root 4.0G Apr 28 17:19 /swapfileAs you can see, only the columns for the root user have the read and write flags enabled.
Now that our file is more secure, we can tell our system to set up the swap space by typing:
sudo
mkswap /swapfileSetting up swapspace
version 1, size = 4194300 KiBno
label, UUID=e2f1e9cf-c0a9-4ed4-b8ab-714b8a7d6944sudo
swapon /swapfilesudo swapon -s
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/swapfile
file 4194300 0 -1
We have a new swap file here. We can use the free
utility again to corroborate our findings:free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3953 101 3851 0 5 30
-/+ buffers/cache: 66 3887
Swap: 4095
0 4095
Our swap has been set up successfully and our operating system
will begin to use it as necessary.Make the Swap File Permanent
We have our swap file enabled, but when we reboot, the server will not automatically enable the file. We can change that though by modifying thefstab file.Edit the file with root privileges in your text editor:
sudo
nano /etc/fstab/swapfile
none swap sw 0 0Tweak your Swap Settings
There are a few options that you can configure that will have an impact on your system's performance when dealing with swap.The
swappiness parameter configures
how often your system swaps data out of RAM to the swap space. This
is a value between 0 and 100 that represents a percentage.With values close to zero, the kernel will not swap data to the disk unless absolutely necessary. Remember, interactions with the swap file are "expensive" in that they take a lot longer than interactions with RAM and they can cause a significant reduction in performance. Telling the system not to rely on the swap much will generally make your system faster.
Values that are closer to 100 will try to put more data into swap in an effort to keep more RAM space free. Depending on your applications' memory profile or what you are using your server for, this might be better in some cases.
We can see the current swappiness value by typing:
cat
/proc/sys/vm/swappiness60We can set the swappiness to a different value by using the
sysctl
command.For instance, to set the swappiness to 10, we could type:
sudo
sysctl vm.swappiness=10vm.swappiness
= 10/etc/sysctl.conf file:sudo
nano /etc/sysctl.confvm.swappiness=10Another related value that you might want to modify is the
vfs_cache_pressure. This setting
configures how much the system will choose to cache inode and dentry
information over other data.
Basically, this is access data about the filesystem. This is generally very costly to look up and very frequently requested, so it's an excellent thing for your system to cache. You can see the current value by querying the
proc
filesystem again:cat
/proc/sys/vm/vfs_cache_pressure100sudo
sysctl vm.vfs_cache_pressure=50vm.vfs_cache_pressure
= 50sudo
nano /etc/sysctl.confvm.vfs_cache_pressure
= 50Source from https://www.digitalocean.com
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