Dynamically growing swap file on Debian

SwapSpace is a utility that creates a ‘dynamic swap file’ which according to the requirements of the operating system changes its size.

So you can even forget about creating a virtual swap file and just install “SwapSpace” and it’ll automatically create one for you and will even resize it when necessary.

You can also use ‘Swapspace’ side by side with a manually created swap file and when the manually one gets filled ‘Swapspace’ will automatically create another one for the OS so the OS will always have a swap space and it enhances the stability.

Another useful thing about “SwapSpace” is that, whenever it can, it’ll reduce the size of the SwapSpace and “release” those bytes into user file system and according to the developers this reduction helps to increase the swap file’s performance as well (plus your “precious” HDD space is not wasted too).

Install with

sudo apt-get install swapspace

And adjust the config file to your needs. I set the minimum to 0 on my VM debian machine with just 8GB HDD

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Additionally I also set the swappiness to 0 to minimize the usage of the precious HDD space on my VM:

To change the system swappiness value, open /etc/sysctl.conf as root. Then, change or add this line to the file:

vm.swappiness = 0

(Reboot for the change to take effect)

Swapspace is old and unmaintained and could lead, one day, to problems in modern systems. I think that the best solution for dynamic swap is to:

sudo apt install dphys-swapfile
sudo update-rc.d dphys-swapfile enable

then setting CONF_SWAPFACTOR=2 in /etc/dphys-swapfile and finally

sudo service dphys-swapfile start