Adding Swap to your KVM VPS

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This guide is applicable only for KVM based VPSes and dedicated servers, If you wish to increase swap on your OpenVZ based VPS please contact us via a Support ticket from the client area.

Once you've done this, we suggest limiting the use of SWAP as using a lot of SWAP affects the Disk I/O, we suggest using the maximum amount of RAM as possible.

Please click here to know how to limit the SWAP usage and maximize the use of RAM.

Creating the swap file

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The following command creates a 512 MB swap file,

dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile1 bs=1024 count=524288

If you're running low on disk space or need a small swap file, create a 128 MB swap file with the following command,

dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile1 bs=1024 count=131072

or a 64 MB swap file with the following,

dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile1 bs=1024 count=65536

Now setup the swap space

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mkswap /swapfile1

Setting up permissions for the swap file

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chown root:root /swapfile1
chmod 0600 /swapfile1

Activating the swap file

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swapon /swapfile1

Verify that the swap file is activated

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free -m

Make the change permanent by editing the /etc/fstab file

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We will now use the nano file editor to make changes in the fstab file which will make the swapfile permanent and doesn't turn off after a reboot.

nano /etc/fstab

Add the following line at the end of the file.

/swapfile1  swap    swap    sw  0   0

Save and exit the file.

You can reboot the server to confirm if the Swap is enabled.