[Tutorial] How to increase SWAP space on Raspberry Pi

If you own a Raspberry Pi you know that the RAM is limited. This should be no problem, because the SWAP is easy to enlarge with Raspbian. Simply put, the SWAP is a cache which is handled similar to the RAM but it is located on a permanent storage device (SD-card). An advantage is that the size is easy to enlarge but it is not as quick-response as the RAM. In this tutorial I will show you how to enlarge the SWAP with Raspbian.

Step 1:

First you have to generate a SWAP-file. A rule of thumb is RAM x 2 = SWAP.
In this example i generate a SWAP-file with 1024 MB with following commands:

sudo su -c 'echo "CONF_SWAPSIZE=1024" > /etc/dphys-swapfile'
sudo dphys-swapfile setup

Step 2:

After generating SWAP-file you ned to activate it one time only:

sudo dphys-swapfile swapon

Finish!

You now have enough SWAP so that it should be no problem if one day the RAM may be overloaded.

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