Situatie
A swap file acts as additional virtual memory when your physical RAM is full. It can prevent your system from crashing due to memory exhaustion, especially on servers or VPS instances with limited resources. While not as fast as RAM, swap gives breathing room to processes under memory pressure. Setting one up is useful on systems without a swap partition or where more swap space is needed temporarily.
Solutie
Step 1: Check If Swap Is Already Enabled
Run: swapon –show
If no output is returned, you have no swap active. Then check memory info:
free -h
Step 2: Create a 1GB Swap File
Use fallocate to quickly create a file:
sudo fallocate -l 1G /swapfile
Then set the correct permissions:
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
Step 3: Format and Enable the Swap File
Step 4: Make Swap Persistent After Reboot
Edit /etc/fstab to enable the swap file at boot
echo ‘/swapfile none swap sw 0 0’ | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab
Conclusion: A swap file gives your Linux server extra memory to work with during peak loads. It’s especially useful on low-RAM VPS systems or when compiling large projects. With just a few commands, you can stabilize your system and reduce out-of-memory crashes.
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