Add swap space temporarily in Solaris

Contributed by qmchenry October 6, 2003  
Tagged: Solaris system administration

Sometimes swap space is inadequate but no free disk slices are available. Until a permanent solution is available, a file can be constructed and added to the swap space.

To make a 250MB addition to swap space using the /var filesystem, run as root:

mkfile 250m /var/newswap
swap -a /var/newswap

The mkfile command makes a file of a specified size. The swap -a command adds the file to the swap space. If you have a free slice, such as /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s5, you can add that to the swap space temporarily with the following command:

swap -a /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s5

These changes are temporary because they will not persist after the system reboots. To make the preceeding two example swap space additions persist after a reboot, place the following lines in the /etc/vfstab file (be very careful making changes to this file):

/var/newswap - - swap - no -
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s5 - - swap - no -