How To Add Swap Space on Ubuntu 22.04

Swap is a section of your hard drive that acts like backup memory when your RAM is full. When your system runs out of RAM, it moves less-used data to the swap space. While this helps prevent crashes, it’s much slower than RAM, especially on non-SSD drives. Having swap space is a useful safety net to keep your system running smoothly during high memory usage.

Check Swap Status

Before we start, let’s check if there’s already some swap space available. A system can have multiple swap files or partitions, but usually, one is enough.

To check, run:

# swapon --show

If there’s no output, it means no swap space is active. You can also check with.

# free -h

How to Increase Swap Size

Turn Off Current Swap

# swapoff -a

Resize the Swap File

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=2048

• bs=1M: Block size of 1MB
• count=1024: 1024 blocks = 1GB

(Adjust the count to increase swap size. For 4GB, use count=4096.)

Set Correct Permissions

# chmod 600 /swapfile

Format as Swap

# mkswap /swapfile

Enable the Swap

# swapon /swapfile

Verify the Swap Size

# free -h

Make It Permanent

# vim /etc/fstab
/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0

Verify that the swap is available

# swapon --show