New Swap Partition

ghostfacedpenguin · 06-07-2005, 08:22 AM

Hello everyone,

I have been looking all over for ways to create a bigger swap partition with out having to reinstall the Hoariest of Hedgehogs! I cannot find anything anywhere, might this be my only recourse, to re-install ubuntu so that I can increase the swap size?

Maybe I don't even need more swap, but when I open apps and do a lot of minimizing/ maximizing etc. it takes a while for things to react and when they do, I get ghastly "trails" from things moving, I would suspect that I need a bigger swap partition, but could be wrong. I have about a gig of ram, but my swap partition is a little under 1x the amount of ram I have. Is this not the norm?

Any suggestion on how to improve system performance is well received, as I am about to start my gaming adventures using ubuntu, I do not want to disaapoint myself and think that ubuntu is not the right choice for this linux newb....

Thanks for any sugestions....

acid_kewpie · 06-07-2005, 08:28 AM

well it's not the swap that matters, but the amount of REAL ram you have, and how it's being used. when you're system is behaving like you describe, run "free" to see the memory usage.

Code:

[root@GBR607SL001 root]# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        511936     504148       7788          0      13156     243692
-/+ buffers/cache:     247300     264636
Swap:      1052216     177212     875004

here i have 512mb of total memory (ram) 500mb used in some form, the rest unused totally. of that 500mb, 240mb is real data, 260 is older cached data. i also have a gig of swap, 170mb of which is being used, 875mb is totally unused. see how yours breaks down.

Hamsjael · 06-07-2005, 10:35 AM

I dont know if a tool like parttion magic handles reiser or others, but i think it can work with ext2/ext3.

Other then that i think your only option is to install a second harddrive, and make a swap parttion on that (easy).

DONT put another swap partition somewhere else on your disk, as this will kill your performance.

horndude · 06-14-2005, 07:25 PM

make a swapfile instead

use dd to zero out a file to the size you want, turn into swap and turn it on, poof, bigger swap file, have it turned on at boot after the drive gets mounted