Ubuntu – How to increase swapfile in Ubuntu 18.04?

hibernateswap

I have laptop with 8 GB RAM and 1TB HDD. I have swapfile which is 2 GB (Ubuntu 18.04 uses a swapfile instead of a separate swap partition by default) and I want to increase it to use hibernation.

I want to increase it from 2 GB to 16 GB. Here is a screenshot of GParted:

I tried to increase it with fallocate -l 16G but it did not work.

Also there is the image from free -m:

Best Answer

From Ubuntu 18.04 onwards, a swapfile rather than a dedicated swap partition is used (except when LVM is used). The swap file is named "swapfile". To change the size of this swap file:

Disable the swap file and delete it (not really needed as you will overwrite it)
```
sudo swapoff /swapfile
sudo rm  /swapfile
```
Create a new swap file of the desired size. With thanks to user Hackinet, you can create a 4 GB swap file with the command
```
sudo fallocate -l 4G /swapfile
```

In this command, adjust 4G to the size you want.

Alternatively, you can use dd but feeding the correct parameters requires some calculations. If you want to make a 4 GB swap file, you will need to write 4 * 1024 blocks of 1024² bytes (= 1 MiB). That will make your count equal to 4 * 1024 = 4096. Create the file of this size with the command

    sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=4096

Assign it read/write permissions for root only (not strictly needed, but it tightens security)
```
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
```
Format the file as swap:
```
sudo mkswap /swapfile
```
The file will be activated on the next reboot. If you want to activate it for the current session:
```
sudo swapon /swapfile
```

You can check the swap that is available with the command swapon -s (no root permissions needed).

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Increase size of encrypted swap

sudo swapoff -a  
sudo cryptsetup resize cryptswap1 --size (in sectors)  
sudo mkswap /dev/mapper/cryptswap1  
sudo swapon -a

If --size is left out, it will use the whole device.

UPDATE - Based on feedback. Reboot and make sure mint--vg-swap_1 is still 980M.
IF IT IS, do the steps below. -- Try manually increasing the size of the container first (I don't think that should have been necessary). Your comment says you are trying to make the swap 4G (+3G), so:

sudo swapoff -a  
sudo lvresize -L+3G /dev/mapper/mint--vg-swap_1
sudo cryptsetup resize cryptswap1 --size 7812500
sudo mkswap /dev/mapper/cryptswap1  
sudo swapon -a

On the other hand, if mint--vg-swap_1 is now 4G, then run this (allow for the size of the header):

sudo swapoff -a  
sudo cryptsetup resize cryptswap1 --size 7808404   
sudo mkswap /dev/mapper/cryptswap1  
sudo swapon -a

Reference

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Increase size of encrypted swap

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