Swap partion creation and priority

Hi Remdore,

I see what you are trying to do, however SWAP is not as good as actual RAM. You might ask why? Simply put, virtual memory is a combination of RAM and disk space that running processes can use. Swap space is the portion of virtual memory that is on the hard disk, used when RAM is full. However SWAP is actually HDD/SSD so it’s slower. If the applications on your droplet do actually need to use that much SWAP they’ll be considerable slower. Having said that it’s good to have SWAP enabled

How to add SWAP

First as you mentioned, we’ll add 3GB of SWAP

sudo fallocate -l 1G /swapfile

If faillocate is not installed, you’ll need to do

yum update
yum install faillocate

Now that you have the swapfile, you’ll need to set the right permissions. Please note only the root user should/will have access to the file

sudo chmod 600 /swapfile

Set up a Linux swap area.

sudo mkswap /swapfile

Enable the swap

sudo swapon /swapfile

To make the change permanent open the /etc/fstab file and append the following line:

/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0

Verify the swap status.

sudo swapon --show

Now your server has SWAP.

As I saw, you want to have different priorities on different SWAP. The default SWAP priority is -1. If you have two swap partitions one with priority 10 and one with priority -1 the swap partion with priority 10 will be used first.

To change the priority of a swap partions, you can

swapon -p 10 /path/to/swap file/partion

That’s it, you now have everything configured as you wished

Kind regards, Kalin D.