We can see if the system has any configured swap by typing: It is possible to have multiple swap files or swap partitions, but generally one should be enough. Step 1 – Checking the System for Swap Informationīefore we begin, we can check if the system already has some swap space available. Overall, having swap space as a fallback for when your system’s RAM is depleted can be a good safety net against out-of-memory exceptions on systems with non-SSD storage available. The information written to disk will be significantly slower than information kept in RAM, but the operating system will prefer to keep running application data in memory and use swap for the older data. The swap space on the hard drive will be used mainly when there is no longer sufficient space in RAM to hold in-use application data.

This lets you increase the amount of information that your server can keep in its working memory, with some caveats. Swap is a portion of hard drive storage that has been set aside for the operating system to temporarily store data that it can no longer hold in RAM. Due to this, we do not recommend enabling swap on DigitalOcean or any other provider that uses SSD storage. Warning: Although swap is generally recommended for systems using traditional spinning hard drives, placing swap on SSDs can cause issues with hardware degradation over time. In this guide, we will cover how to add a swap file to an Ubuntu 20.04 server. One way to guard against out-of-memory errors in applications is to add some swap space to your server.

Adding desktop to ubuntu server