Users who stake on Raspberry Pis earlier than the Raspberry Pi 3 (such as the Original Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi Zero, and potentially the Raspberry Pi 2) may benefit from a significant increase in performance by enabling and/or increasing the size of the Raspberry Pi’s swap file.
Note: Using a swap file could potentially result in an increase in writes & reads to your Raspberry Pi’s SD card, possibly lowering the lifespan of the card. However in most cases Raspbian ships with a default swap file with a size of 100 MB and in this case we are simply increasing that to 2048 MB.
First check the default Swap size should be 100 MB.
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$ free -m total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 924 287 107 23 530 652 Swap: 100 1 99
Edit the file /etc/dphys-swapfile and modify the variable CONF_SWAPSIZE:
# /etc/dphys-swapfile - user settings for dphys-swapfile package # author Neil Franklin, last modification 2010.05.05 # copyright ETH Zuerich Physics Departement # use under either modified/non-advertising BSD or GPL license # this file is sourced with . so full normal sh syntax applies # the default settings are added as commented out CONF_*=* lines # where we want the swapfile to be, this is the default #CONF_SWAPFILE=/var/swap # set size to absolute value, leaving empty (default) then uses computed value # you most likely don't want this, unless you have an special disk situation # CONF_SWAPSIZE=100 # Generally, when the memory is less than 2G, the swap partition should be twice the memory. CONF_SWAPSIZE=2048 # set size to computed value, this times RAM size, dynamically adapts, # guarantees that there is enough swap without wasting disk space on excess #CONF_SWAPFACTOR=2 # restrict size (computed and absolute!) to maximally this limit # can be set to empty for no limit, but beware of filled partitions! # this is/was a (outdated?) 32bit kernel limit (in MBytes), do not overrun it # but is also sensible on 64bit to prevent filling /var or even / partition #CONF_MAXSWAP=2048