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I'm very new to Ubuntu, using 14.04. I need to make swap space, so I read, to overcome a garbage collector problem. My RAM is 8 GB, and my code is using big data and uses a lot of RAM.

What is swap space? Does it mean using flash memory or is it a way to use the RAM of the laptop? What should I do (from scratch)?

command lsblk gave 

NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0 465.8G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0 461.9G  0 part /
├─sda2   8:2    0     1K  0 part 
└─sda5   8:5    0   3.9G  0 part [SWAP]
sr0     11:0    1  1024M  0 rom

command free-h gave 

        total        used  free  shared  buffers  cached
Mem:      7.6G       7.4G  163M   727M   196M     4.9G
-/+ buffers/cache:   2.3G  5.2G
Swap:      9.9G       0B   9.9G

swapon -s gave me 

Filename                Type        Size    Used    Priority
/dev/sda5               partition   4086780     0       -1
/swapfile               file        6291452     0       -2

blkid gave me 

/dev/sda1: UUID="bf8fe3ec-1937-458f-be1e-5e1270111217" TYPE="ext4" 
/dev/sda5: UUID="2336032a-d853-4d38-9b2c-c24793586d3c" TYPE="swap"

gparted

Zanna
  • 70,465
prog
  • 69

1 Answers1

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Memory is divided into "pages". when memory fills the system will write some idle pages to disk so that it can use active memory for other programs, this is called paging.

Swap Space is the disk area the system uses for paging. on some systems it is a file. Ubuntu and other linux/unix system use a drive partition for swap space. While a swapfile can grow as needed, it is subject to fragmentation. Since memory pages are all the same size, a swap partition does not have fragmentation issues but is limited to the size of the partition made for it.

Swap space is also used for hibernation. Thus it is recommended that swap space be at least twice the size of your installed memory.

If you can post a screen shot of your partitioning information, I can give more dtailed instructions on adding space if you need to

ravery
  • 6,874
  • Generalization: RAM x 2 = swap space is good for low memory models. For machines with higher amounts of RAM, the formula looks more like swap = (RAM/2)... hibernation excluded. – heynnema Jul 02 '17 at 00:59
  • @heynnema -- thank you for that. so he should have 12G swap? – ravery Jul 02 '17 at 01:03
  • No, I agree with you... in this case, with only 8G RAM, 16G swap would be fine. I was just cautioning you that the RAMx2 rule really doesn't apply when you have 16G or 32G RAM. – heynnema Jul 02 '17 at 01:06
  • I would disagree. I have 8 GB RAM, 3 GB of swap files in total, which never goes over 1 GB in usage. 16 GB of swap is overkill of average home user. – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy Jul 02 '17 at 04:02
  • @SergiyKolodyazhnyy but, if you notice, the OP says "not good to my code which is using big data", so their swap usage may be different than yours. Small amount of RAM require larger amounts of swap. Larger amounts of RAM require smaller amounts of swap. – heynnema Jul 02 '17 at 04:10
  • @heynnema OK, I can agree with that. For big data analysis, developers, users who run resource-heavy applications - sure, they might need more swap. For average users, which I already said in my comment, there's no need to go crazy with swap – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy Jul 02 '17 at 04:13