Sometimes running some stressing tests causes some important apps to be killed by the OS because free RAM is approaching zero. Since I don’t actively use the computer while those tests are running, large latencies are tolerable. The following shows how to use storage on disk to mimic RAM.

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# creating a swap file of 32G, the same size of my RAM
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=~/swapfile bs=1G count=32 status=progress

$ mkswap ./swapfile
$ sudo chmod 600 ./swapfile
$ sudo swapon ./swapfile

Adding the following to /etc/fstab:

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# my swapfile
/home/albert/swapfile none swap defaults 0 0

One can use free -h to check the swap usage:

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$ free -h
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            31Gi       8.8Gi        10Gi       282Mi        11Gi        21Gi
Swap:           31Gi       212Mi        31Gi

§Reference