[ubuntu-za] Swap space

[Bill Cairns]

Thanks to those who helped me with this problem.

I ended up creating a swap file. In case someone else is thinking of going
down the same path, here are some comments on my experience.

I followed the method described in https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq
.

First I created a swap file on my old computer that I use for this sort of
experimentation. It is running 17.04 Budgie at the moment. It has 2 Gigs of
RAM and I created a 3 Gig swap file with no problems at all following the
FAQ all the way.

Buoyed by this success, I tried the same thing (with an 8 Gig swap file
this time) on my main computer - 16.04 with 8 Gibs of RAM.

The first thing that happened is that I ran out of disk space and nearly
killed the system dead. I have only 20 GB in my root partition (what is the
proper name?) and using fallocate to create an 8 GB file use it all up. My
OS was not a happy chap and did all sorts of funny things - Unity was very
cross with me and would only show me music whatever I asked to see,

I managed to get rid of that file and decided to create the swap file in my
home partition I thought I did that without problems, but then mkswap told
me that the files had holes in it. Why is did not have holes on my other
computer I do not know. However, I recreated the file using dd (after
managing to work my way through its rather strange syntax) and so the file
was created OK.

After checking it worked, I have included the new swap file in fstab.

Everything seems good now. I have tried to crash the system in the way that
I jammed it up in the past - by editing a large number of large images
simultaneously and keeping them all open in both Gimp and the Digikam
editor. The system seems to have developed sufficient robustness that it
has not died yet. Here's hoping.

Thanks again for the help and advice.

Bill



On 28 October 2017 at 19:22, Bill Cairns <cairnsww at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have just discovered that my drive is very poorly partitioned. The
> results of lssblk -
>
> bill at Zita:~$ sudo lsblk -o NAME,FSTYPE,SIZE,MOUNTPOINT,LABEL
> [sudo] password for bill:
> NAME   FSTYPE     SIZE MOUNTPOINT               LABEL
> sda             931.5G
> ├─sda1 ext4      18.6G /
> ├─sda2              1K
> ├─sda5 swap        94M [SWAP]
> └─sda6 ext4     912.8G /home
>
> (I can only assume that, way back when, I decided on 10 Gigs for my swap
> partition and finger problems meant that gave it 9 Megs instead!)
>
> I obviously seldom need any swap space, but I have been troubled when I do
> a lot of image editing that I seem to run out of disk space. I suspect that
> all my editing programs (and I use Gimp, Digikam, and Gthumb at different
> times) have similar problems and don't free up disk space when they have
> finished editing an image. If I watch memory usage using System Monitor, I
> can see memory vanishing slowly. If I allow this situation to continue too
> long, my system suddenly freezes up and (I assume) it is valiantly trying
> to swap something out to that 94 Meg partition.
>
> I have 8 Gigs of RAM.
>
> So I wonder if anyone can help me?
>
> 1. Are these assumptions correct or possible correct?
> 2. How much swap space should I have? (I sort of feel that  I shouldn't
> need any, but assuming that these image editing programs really do share
> the same problem of memory leakage, should I at least make provision for
> them?
> 3. I would really like to install 18.04 before tackling this problem by
> redoing the partitions (and I have this dream of a small SSD for the OS
> ...) Is there an interim solution that someone can suggest?
>
> Thanks for your time,
>   Bill
>
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