Be Sure Blog | How To Increase The Swap Memory Size In Ubuntu

Let's increase the swap size from 512mb to 2gb without changing the partition permanently (this was too hot for me).

sudo swapon --show

Will display something like:

NAME     TYPE      SIZE USED PRIO     
/dev/sdb partition 512M 512M   -2

Let's increase the size from 512mb to 2gb:

sudo swapoff -a
sudo fallocate -l 2G /swapfile
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile
sudo swapon --show

Result:

NAME      TYPE SIZE USED PRIO
/swapfile file   2G   0B   -2

After a reboot, you need to run:

sudo swapoff -a
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile

Or, let's create a script to run on startup, to set the swap to 2gb!

sudo nano startupscript.sh

Content:

#!/bin/bash
sudo swapoff -a
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile

Then save and close it and run:

sudo chmod +x startupscript.sh
readlink -f startupscript.sh

Copy the files link. Then run

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/startupscript.service

Content:

[Unit]
Description=Startup Script
After=network.target
[Service]
ExecStart=/yourlinkgoeshere/startupscript.sh
[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Then save and close it and run:

sudo systemctl enable startupscript.service
sudo systemctl start startupscript.service
sudo reboot

Test if the swap size is still 2gb after reboot:

htop

For troubleshooting the startupscript service:

sudo systemctl status startupscript.service

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