Extending your swap partition in CentOS

While I’m not a fan of SWAP memory, there are certain cases that can really save you by using swap. Would you rather get out of memory errors, or have a temporary slow down?

The CentOS/RHEL manual has a great quick tutorial on how to increase your swap space on an LVM2 logical partition. Since the default swap partition on a CentOS box is /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01, that will be used in this example. The quick 5 steps are as follows:

Use swapoff to disable swapping for the associated logical swap volume
lvesize the logical volume to meet your needs
Use mkswap to format the new swap space so it can be used properly
Use swapon to enable the newly expanded swap volume
Lastly, it’s always good to verify that the swap volume has grown the proper amount

Example: Extend the current swap LVM partition

swapoff -v /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 lvm lvresize /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 -L +1G mkswap /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 swapon -va cat /proc/swaps

Another handy trick to “create” more swap space when you aren’t using LVM or don’t have an extra partition laying around is to create a swap file yourself.

Create a file (full of zeros) that is the desired size
Use mkswap to format the new swap space so it can be used properly
Use swapon to enable the newly created swap file

Example: Create a swap file of 1GB and add it to the swap pool

dd if=/dev/zero of=/opt/swap-file bs=1024 count=1000000
mkswap -f /opt/swap-file
swapon /opt/swap-file