Environment
Retain 4
SLES 11
Situation
My swap is only 2G and the index migration process is bogging down because the indexer wants more RAM. If I cannot add an additional swap disk, how can I create a swap file?
Resolution
The swap disk is ideal, but if it cannot be created for some reason, here are the steps to creating a file that gets converted to being used as swap memory. These instructions are based off of this Internet article: https://www.maketecheasier.com/swap-partitions-on-linux/
1. Find a volume that has the available disk space.
2. Create the file that will be converted to swap:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/[path to swapfile]/[swapfile name] bs=1024 count=[total byte size of the file]
Example of creating a 1G swap file called "swapfile":
dd if=/dev/zero of=/vol2/swap/swapfile bs=1024 count=1048576
Example of creating a 100G swap file called "swapfile":
dd if=/dev/zero of=/vol2/swap/swapfile bs=1024 count=104857600
3. Make the file a swap file:
mkswap /[path to swapfile]/[swapfile name]
Example: mkswap /vol2/swap/swapfile
4. Turn on swap for that file:
swapon /[path to swapfile]/[swapfile name]
Example: swapon /vol2/swap/swapfile
5. Add the new swapfile to fstab so that it automatically becomes swap memory upon bootup:
The entry in /etc/fstab should look like this:
/[path to swapfile]/[swapfile name] none swap sw 0 0
Example: /vol2/swap/swapfile none swap sw 0 0