Enabling & Increasing Raspberry Pi Swap

Note: Due to RAM limitations on the Raspberry Pi 3 and earlier, we now recommend ALL users use Neblio with a Raspberry Pi 4. Any Raspberry Pi 4 model should work, the models with more RAM are more future-proof for running Neblio.

Users of Neblio who stake on Raspberry Pis earlier than the Raspberry Pi 3 (such as the Original Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi Zero, and potentially the Raspberry Pi 2) may benefit from a significant increase in performance by enabling and/or increasing the size of the Raspberry Pi's swap file.

To enable the Raspberry Pi swap file and set it to a size of 1 GB (1024 MB), run the following commands on the Raspberry Pi in a terminal window:

1. Temporarily Stop Swap

sudo dphys-swapfile swapoff

2. Modify the size of the swap

As root, edit the file /etc/dphys-swapfile and modify the variable CONF_SWAPSIZE to 1024:

CONF_SWAPSIZE=1024

Using a command such as:

sudo nano /etc/dphys-swapfile

3. Initialize Swap File

sudo dphys-swapfile setup

4. Start Swap

sudo dphys-swapfile swapon

Note

Using a swap file could potentially result in an increase in writes & reads to your Raspberry Pi's SD card, possibly lowering the lifespan of the card. However in most cases Raspbian ships with a default swap file with a size of 100 MB and in this case we are simply increasing that to 1024 MB.