Hi all,

I created a swap partition (8 gb as part of a 250 gb drive).

I formatted the partition as swap and enabled it using:

When I do 'top' or 'free' I can see that the swap is recognized.

Also when I do:

i get:

However, I had to add swapon /dev/sdc1 as a startup service, because it didn't stick.

Also, I never see any programs use the swap memory (it always says 0 under 'used' when i do free).

I have 4 gb internal memory, that is also not fully used. Is that the reason the system doesn't use the swap memory?

Thnx, M0s..

I sure there must be a thousand threads that ask this very question.
Not using swap is good - swap is very slow, so the system will only use it when it has to.

Add an entry to fstab for swap and you can remove the swapon each boot.

Thanks for the reply.

Could you please point me in the right direction in what way to edit fstab?

thnx M0s..

As said you need to add it to your fstab so every time you rebooted the system will mount it and it'll be ready to use.

fstab has the format:

filesystem mount_point filesystem_tye mount_options dump pass
For your case the solution would be:
Append the line above to /etc/fstab and issue
if you want to use it right away or reboot and it will be avaiable after reboot.

EDIT : Altered the sda1 typo.

1 members found this post helpful.

just to be sure, in my case, wouldn't it be:

/dev/sdc1 none swap defaults 0 0

(instead of /dev/sda1)

thnx. M0s..

Yes it should be /dev/sdc1. Sorry about that.

1 members found this post helpful.

Linux swaps only when it needs to.

Here's the clearest explanation I've found on fstab, though it doesn't go into using UUIDs; I think it predates them.