I'm very new to Ubuntu, using 14.04. I need to make swap space, so I read, to overcome a garbage collector problem. My RAM is 8 GB, and my code is using big data and uses a lot of RAM.
What is swap space? Does it mean using flash memory or is it a way to use the RAM of the laptop? What should I do (from scratch)?
command lsblk gave
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 465.8G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 461.9G 0 part /
├─sda2 8:2 0 1K 0 part
└─sda5 8:5 0 3.9G 0 part [SWAP]
sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom
command free-h gave
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 7.6G 7.4G 163M 727M 196M 4.9G
-/+ buffers/cache: 2.3G 5.2G
Swap: 9.9G 0B 9.9G
swapon -s gave me
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/dev/sda5 partition 4086780 0 -1
/swapfile file 6291452 0 -2
blkid gave me
/dev/sda1: UUID="bf8fe3ec-1937-458f-be1e-5e1270111217" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sda5: UUID="2336032a-d853-4d38-9b2c-c24793586d3c" TYPE="swap"
Best Answer
Memory is divided into "pages". when memory fills the system will write some idle pages to disk so that it can use active memory for other programs, this is called paging.
Swap Space is the disk area the system uses for paging. on some systems it is a file. Ubuntu and other linux/unix system use a drive partition for swap space. While a swapfile can grow as needed, it is subject to fragmentation. Since memory pages are all the same size, a swap partition does not have fragmentation issues but is limited to the size of the partition made for it.
Swap space is also used for hibernation. Thus it is recommended that swap space be at least twice the size of your installed memory.
If you can post a screen shot of your partitioning information, I can give more dtailed instructions on adding space if you need to