How can I check whether I have a swap partition in Suse Linux 9.2 pro?
 

That's it. I'm not sure if I actually have a swap partition working, that's because the installation programme didn't tell me anything about swap partitions and my computer almost freezes when doing some kind of odd commands, such as cat /dev/hda1 (my 55GB-almost-full-windows partition).

Thanks in advance.

$ df -h
if it says 'tmpfs', you definitely have a swap partition. To check if it's working, open some kind of swap-space-usage-meter (the GNOME applet 'system monitor' or similar should do), then start python:
$ python
>>> a = []
>>> while True: a.append(range(100))
...
(^C)
KeyboardInterrupt
>>> (^D)
$ (^D)

it should fill up your memory pretty fast, forcing the kernel to swap out something. If it can't, because you have no swap, you'll probably get a MemoryError (or similar) from python; of course, you might get the same message when running out of swap, so the swap-o-meter comes in handy.

Hope this helps,

Jonas

Hi,

fdisk -l /dev/hdX X being a, b. There should be an entry like this:

/dev/hda1 1 499 4008186 82 Linux swap

hda1 is just an example, could differ for you.

free and top show swap space (and how much is used).

Take a look at your /etc/fstab file, there should be an entry like:

/dev/hda1 swap swap sw,pri=128 0 0

hda1 being your swap partition. Again hda1 is just an example and sw,pri=128 can be different too.

Hope this helps.

swapon -s
Bit simpler than cat /proc/swaps

Hey, that was great! I think I have it working, but it says I only have 125MB of swap space, is it enough? Somewhere I heard that it should be about 2GB, I think. In any case, is any way of expanding it without destroying my other partitions? I mean in a Windows Partition Magic way for linux or something.

Thank you in advance again ;D

hi,

i think you could also use 'top' - it'll tell you all about what processes are running and give memory information, including any swap space..

Hi and thank you to all of you for replying so incredibly fast!!

This is somewhat curious: (I don't have the fdisk command installed, it says 'command not found', maybe suse 9.2 pro doesn't install it in its typical installation..) when I type df I can see 125MB of swap space, but when I type cat /etc/fstab I can't see any swap partition, even more, I can't see the word 'swap' in the whole output! Maybe the swap space is in my main linux etc3 partition making its performance undergo a lot?

Thank you again!

How long is a piece of string ???.
Like most ROTs (rule of thumbs) they are out of date as soon as they are formulated. All the swap ROTs are from a time (not that long ago) when large RAM was uncommon.
If you have half a Gig or more (of RAM) don't worry too much about swap unless you are a *heavy* user. Oracle comes out with stupid numbers like you mentioned.
Swap can always be added if you have spare disk space - Linux supports multiple swaps.

Okay, that's my output at cat /etc/fstab:

/dev/hda4 / reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 1
/dev/hda1 /windows/C ntfs ro,users,gid=users,umask=0002,nls=utf8 0 0
/dev/hda3 /windows/D vfat users,gid=users,umask=0002,iocharset=utf8 0 0
/dev/hda5 /windows/E vfat users,gid=users,umask=0002,iocharset=utf8 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
/dev/cdrecorder /media/cdrecorder subfs fs=cdfss,ro,procuid,nosuid,nodev,exec,iocharset=utf8 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy subfs fs=floppyfss,procuid,nodev,nosuid,sync 0 0

I only have 256MB of RAM, but I'm planning to buy more. I'm worrying about swap space because of I execute some hugely CPU or RAM consuming programmes, my suse linux 9.2 pro system almost hangs, and I barely can CTRL+C, CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE it. Sometimes it is completely impossible and I have to plug off my computer :(

256 is a not large these days - try cfdisk /dev/hda
If you have some free space, create a partition of say 512Meg - make it larger if you want. Then,
then Then add it it to fstab as;
Looks like you may be correct about the current swap being allocated within a file system - I don't know Suse.
edit if commands don't work, try them as /sbin/?????

Ok, I've run fdisk and killed an old, useless and experimental-purpose win98 partition. Now I want it to be my swap, it's about 7,5 GB but I just want 1 GB of it. I've removed it with fdisk, made mkswap and swapon as root (thanks for the tip, didn't work without being root :D) but when I introduce the swapon command it tells me that partition is busy. Then, I restarted my computer but in grub I still could see a "windows 2" boot possibility and linux mounted again the partition with all the files in it (!!!??). I saved changes in fdisk, what's going on?