Clean swap area after using a memory hogging application

swapoff -a ; swapon -a
When you run a memory intensive application (VirtualBox, large java application, etc) swap area is used as soon as memory becomes insufficient. After you close the program, the data in swap is not put back on memory and that decreases the responsiveness. Swapoff disables the swap area and forces system to put swap data be placed in memory. Since running without a swap area might be detrimental, swapon should be used to activate swap again. Both swapoff and swapon require root privileges.

10
By: alperyilmaz
2009-03-25 03:30:41
swapoff swapon swapoff swapon
2
Submit An Alternative

What Others Think

Thanks for this. I m a big fan of https://www.commandlinefu.com/ service.
VictorJKoo · 81 weeks and 6 days ago
Do you know about https://www.commandlinefu.com/ which I use
VictorJKoo · 81 weeks and 6 days ago

What do you think?

Any thoughts on this command? Does it work on your machine? Can you do the same thing with only 14 characters?

You must be signed in to comment.

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

Share Your Commands

Similar Commands

View memory utilisation

Show concurrent memory usage for individual instances of an application

Tell us quantities of disk usage memory and swap used in a moment done

Add temporary swap space

Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for: