Improving the performance of your Raspberry Pi 5 is often necessary when running demanding applications or multitasking. One effective way to help your system cope under heavy load is by increasing the amount of swap memory. While not a direct replacement for physical RAM, swap acts as virtual memory on your SD card or SSD, allowing the system to move less frequently used data from RAM to storage, freeing up space for active processes. This can prevent crashes and make the system feel more responsive when RAM is fully utilized.
Before you make any changes, it’s a good idea to check your current swap configuration. You can do this by opening a terminal window on your Raspberry Pi 5 and running the command swapon --show. Alternatively, the command free -h will also display information about your RAM and swap usage in a human-readable format, showing the total, used, and free amounts. This gives you a baseline to understand your current setup.
On Raspberry Pi OS, the system typically manages swap using a utility called dphys-swapfile. To adjust the size of your swap memory, you need to edit its configuration file. Use a text editor like nano to open the file located at /etc/dphys-swapfile. The command for this is sudo nano /etc/dphys-swapfile. Using sudo is essential because this is a system file requiring administrative privileges to modify.
Inside the dphys-swapfile configuration file, you will find a line starting with CONF_SWAPSIZE. This line sets the size of your swap file in megabytes. The default size is often 100MB or 256MB on older models, but you can change this value. For example, to set your swap size to 1GB, you would change the line to CONF_SWAPSIZE=1024. For 2GB, it would be CONF_SWAPSIZE=2048, and so on, using increments of 1024 for each gigabyte. Remember that setting an excessively large swap size might consume significant space on your storage device.
After modifying the CONF_SWAPSIZE value, save the file and exit the text editor. With nano, you press Ctrl+X, then Y to confirm the save, and Enter to use the current filename. For the changes to take effect, you need to restart the dphys-swapfile service. First, stop the service using the command sudo systemctl stop dphys-swapfile.
Next, regenerate the swap file with the new size using the command sudo dphys-swapfile setup. This command will recreate the swap file based on the size you specified in the configuration file. Finally, start the dphys-swapfile service again to enable the new swap space by running sudo systemctl start dphys-swapfile.
To confirm that your swap memory has been successfully increased, run the swapon --show or free -h command once more. You should now see the updated total swap size reflecting the value you set in the dphys-swapfile configuration. Your Raspberry Pi 5 will now utilize the larger swap space as needed to manage its virtual memory, potentially leading to improved stability and performance when running memory-intensive tasks. This change is persistent and will remain in effect after rebooting your Raspberry Pi 5.
Source: https://www.linuxlinks.com/raspberry-pi5-desktop-mini-pc-increase-swap/
