Tag archive for: swap space

Adding swap space for my Ubuntu Server 15.10.3 image running on my Raspberry Pi 3

A swap space. also known as virtual memory, is a dedicated area on a writable medium that acts like the RAM for Linux processes to remember things while they are running. For laptop and desktop computers, that writable medium is usually a hard disk. For my Raspberry Pi 3, it is the microSD card which I had written my Ubuntu 15.10.3 image on.

While running the Let’s Encrypt application to set up a free CA signed SSL certificate for my LEMP server on my Raspberry Pi 3 to secure connections to my WordPress site, the Let’s Encrypt application hanged while it was trying to install the Python dependencies that it needed. This prompted me to turn to swap space for increasing the total memory that processes on my Ubuntu 15.10.3 image can utilize.

This post documents the steps that I took to add some swap space on my Ubuntu 15.10.3 image running on my Raspberry Pi 3 so that processes can use more than 1GB of memory.