Add Swap Space to your Raspberry Pi

Sometimes you might need a little bit of help to have more memory, then you can add swap space to your OS.

But this means more writes to I/O which can cause your CPU to spike.

Create the 2GB file:

$ sudo swapon /swapfile

Or if you prefer dd:

$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=2048 count=1048576

Set the permissions:

$ sudo chmod 600 /swapfile

Make it a swap file:

$ sudo mkswap /swapfile

Activate the swap:

$ sudo swapon /swapfile

Enable swap to load on boot:

$ cat /etc/fstab
..
/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0

View swap utilization either with:

$ swapon --show

or:

$ free -m