swapspace

[Colin Law]

On 18 October 2014 09:28, Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:
>  Is there a simple way of
> using up lots of ram so to force it to swap?

And the answer is yes there is an easy way.  Install memtester then
close down all apps and run, for example

memtester 1000

to grab 1GB of RAM.  memtester will avoid swap (reducing the extent if
necessary), so then startup Firefox or similar to grab some extra
memory and force the use of swap.

Doing this I find that swapspace is working fine, when the amount of
free space gets low then it allocates a swap file and that space then
appears in top or similar and in System Monitor.  Ctrl-C to shut down
memtester.  So all is well with swapspace, I was confused by the fact
that when not needed it shows that swap is not available, when in fact
it is available, if needed.

So provided it is reliable then no need to fiddle about with swap
partitions, just install swapspace.

Cheers

Colin