Change swap file size in Virtualmin

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If you follow to our Virtualmin Installation, the installation script set the Swap file size to 263M by default. If you wish to check your current swap file, run the “free -h”

[[email protected] ~]# free -h
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           992M        369M        426M        500K        195M        470M
Swap:          263M        120M        142M

However, if you have not created your first Virtualmin installation, you may refer to these links article below:

Install Virtualmin on Ubuntu 16.04.
Install Virtualmin on Debian 9

To go about this, let us change the swap file size twice the size of your current RAM. In our situation, we have 1 GB of RAM. In my case, I will change the 2 GB.

Let us get this started!

swapoff -a

dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile count=2048 bs=1MiB

2048 is the MB size I wish to apply for my swap file. If you wish to change these to your desired MB size, feel free to do so.

mkswap /swapfile

swapon /swapfile

Let us edit the fstab (known as file systems table) file.

sudo nano /etc/fstab

Then, add this line below:

/swapfile   swap    swap    sw  0   0

To save our changes, press ctrl + x, then enter y. Once saved, run this command below:

sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=10

sudo nano /etc/sysctl.conf

From here, add these lines below:

vm.swappiness = 10
vm.vfs_cache_pressure = 50

To save our changes, press ctrl + x, then enter y. Once completed, you may verify these changes via:

free -h

              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           996M        726M        137M         18M        132M        124M
Swap:          2.0G        500M        1.5G

At this point, you should be all set. Great Job.