Re: Swapping like gangbusters!

On Thu, 7 Nov 2024 09:28:10 -0500, Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us>
wrote in <vgiips$2mgad$2@dont-email.me>:

So occasionally kswapd will start going whole hog. In combination with
Chromium running and a make -j N job running, the system would slow
wayyyyyy down,
with kswapd trying to find a swap partition that did not exist (my
bad!).
 
There's a daemon called swapspace in the Debian repository. But I
decided to try making a swapfile first. Here are the steps ("#"
indicates a root prompt or the use of sudo):
 
# fallocate -l 4G /swapfile             [or see the "dd" command below]
# chmod 600 /swapfile # mkswap /swapfile # swapon /swapfile # vi
/etc/fstab, and add:
 
    /swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0    [to make the change permanent at
    boot]
 
# swapon --show                         [to verify]
 
Alternate command:
 
    # dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=4194304
 
Imma go with this for awhile and see how it goes. If you try it, don't
blame me if it fscks up your system :-D

Thanks for the heads-up about fallocate(1).

If creating a large file for (say) a virtual host, you might want
to consider truncate(1), which builds a sparse file.

--
-v System76 Thelio Mega v1.1 x86_64 NVIDIA RTX 3090 Ti
   OS: Linux 6.11.6 Release: Mint 21.3 Mem: 258G
   "If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own."