A.P. Lawrence

This article is from a FAQ concerning SCO operating systems. While some of the information may be applicable to any OS, or any Unix or Linux OS, it may be specific to SCO Xenix, Open Desktop or Openserver.

There is lots of Linux, Mac OS X and general Unix info elsewhere on this site: Search this site is the best way to find anything.

Unix, Xenix and ODT General FAQ

Can I add more swap space?

Yes, with caveats. The first one does not apply to Xenix. If you have space in your Unix partition which is not allocated to any device (i.e. is not being used by a filesystem, your swap device, etc.), use /etc/swap to add this to your system's available swap space. Note that free space within a filesystem cannot be used in this manner. Also, this setting only works until the system is shutdown, so if you want it to be done permanently, put it in a file in /etc/rc2.d so it gets run whenever the system goes multiuser. If you have two hard drives, you can split swap space between them, which may improve swapping performance.

On OpenServer Release 5, you can also add swap space in the form of a file on one of your filesystems. As with the previous section, you use the swap command, and the added swap space does not become permanent unless you add it to a startup file. I have no benchmarks on this, but I'd expect that swapping to a file is at least a bit slower than swapping to a dedicated swap division.

The second approach will work on any SCO operating system, but will require downtime and probably a backup/restore. You can bring the system up from emergency boot diskettes (or from the distribution media; instructions are elsewhere in the FAQ) and adjust your drive's division table. However, in order to adjust the size of a filesystem or swap device, you must delete it and recreate it, so if you need to take space from a filesystem to add it to swap, you will need to backup that filesystem and restore it later.

• How much swap space do I need?
• I've added more RAM, do I need more swap?

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