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Devar-TTY
Asked: 2011-04-08 07:07:17 +0800 CST

Moving/Adding Additional Swap Location - Redhat 5

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OK, here's what's going on.

I've got a RedHat 5 server with a swap partition (/dev/sda3) that's 3GB.

For some reason swap memory is still being taken up on / (/dev/sda2), and fills up the drive on occasion. Is there a way I can tell my system that if it needs to use HD space for swap, to use a different drive?

linux redhat disk-space-utilization memory swap

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    To find really what is using your space, use df to see the partition layout and disk usage, and du / -h --max-depth=1 to get an estimative of directory sizes and from that see what is happening.

    Also, swapon -s will show exactly what swap devices are being used and how much of each one is occupied.

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  2. Ignoring all the parts of your question that make no sense, you can use mkswap to format a device to use as swap, and you can use swapon to activate it. Add it to /etc/fstab if you want to make it permanent.

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  3. You can simply follow the below steps to create a additional swap partition on Linux.

    • Just create a partition with fdisk command and change it's partition code for Linux swap partition e.g. 82.

    • now use command mkswap drive_name to create the swap signature, then use swapon drive name command to activate the swap partition.

    For example, to create swap partition type:

    mkswap /dev/sdb1

    and to activate it 

    swapon /dev/sdb1

    Note : I have mentioned /dev/sdb1 for example purposes, you use the drive as per your scenario.

    now mount the created swap partition on /etc/fstab file.

    for testing you can use below commands :-

    swapon -s shows swap usage summary by device

    free -m Display amount of free and used memory in the system

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