Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE DESKTOP 11 - DEPLOYMENT GUIDE 17-03-2009 Deployment Manual page 171

resolves the issue. Note, that you will need a certain amount of swap if the computer
should perform a "suspend to disk". In that case, the swap size should be reasonably
big to contain the necessary data from memory (512 MB–1GB).
System with lots of swap (several GB)
It is better to not have an application that is running wild and swapping frantically,
in this case. If you do have this problem, the system will need many hours to recover.
In the process, it is likely that other processes get timeouts and faults, leaving the
system in an undefined state, even if the faulty process is killed. In this case, reboot
the machine hard and try to get it running again. Lots of swap is only useful if you
have an application that relies on this feature. Such applications (like databases or
graphics manipulation programs) often have an option to directly use hard disk
space for their needs. It is advisable to use this option instead of using lots of swap
space.
If your system does not run wild, but needs more swap after some time, it is possible
to extend the swap space online. If you prepared a partition for swap space, just add
this partition with YaST. If you do not have a partition available, you may also just use
a swap file to extend the swap. Swap files are generally slower than partitions, but
compared to physical ram, both are extremely slow and the actual speed difference is
not as important as one would think in the first place.
Procedure 12.1 Adding a Swap File Manually
To add a swap file in the running system, proceed as follows:
1 Create an empty file in your system. For example, if you want to add a swap file
with 128 MB swap at /var/lib/swap/swapfile, use the commands:
mkdir -p /var/lib/swap
dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/lib/swap/swapfile bs=1M count=128
2 Initialize this swap file with the command
mkswap /var/lib/swap/swapfile
3 Activate the swap with the command
swapon /var/lib/swap/swapfile
To disable this swap file, use the command
swapoff /var/lib/swap/swapfile
Advanced Disk Setup 161