Idea Blade/ZTE Blade comes with 167 MB usable memory. Their is no way you can install CyanogenMod9/10 in such a low RAM. However I took a chance and installed CM9 and it slogs like hell. Swapper2 can be used to add swap, but it adds another memory and space constraint. drewhill77 came up with an excellent way to add swap without installing swapper2. This is a simple way using which a swap is added in typical UNIX system.
In this post I will follow drewhill77’s steps but I will confine it to ZTE Blade. I assume CyanogenMod9 is pre-installed on the device. A swap-file will be created on SD-card instead of using a partition. Unlike swapper2 which limits swap-file size to 256MB, this file-size can be extended as long as size of the SD-card permits. Following procedure may also work for other devices, provided they are rooted. User should be familiar with shell commands and should be able to do some system level jobs.
drewhill77 have used terminal manager to execute all commands but I prefer adb over it. Usage of adb is beyond the scope of this post. After you enter the device shell using adb using
adb shell
Change to root
First and foremost thing is to have root access to the device. In CyanogenMod, a pre-installed SuperUser app with grant root access to all applications as well as to file-system.
su
will give root access. The prompt will change from $ to #.
Create a swap-file
Create a swap-file with the name swapfile.swp on SD-card.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/sdcard/swapfile.swp bs=1048576 count=256
count is the size of swapfile in MB. I prefer 256 MB.
Make swap and turn it on.
Once swapfile is created, which should not take more than a couple of minutes. Convert it into swapfile(previously it was just a bunch of zero’s). And finally inform system to use it as a swap file or add it to existing swap if is already exist.
mkswap /mnt/sdcard/swapfile.swp swapon /mnt/sdcard/swapfile.swp
Once swap is added, its time to confirm it using free command.
free -m
| total | used | free | shared | buffers | |
| Mem: | 171296 | 165552 | 5744 | 0 | 104 |
| -/+ | buffers: | 165448 | 5848 | ||
| Swap: | 262136 | 114888 | 147248 |
The swap will be added as seen in Swap column.
Swappiness
Now the swap is added and it is in use but the kernel will not use it at the fullest if swappiness is not set properly. Swappiness decides how aggressively you want the kernel to use swap. It’s value ranges from 0 to 100. The lower value means kernel will try to avoid using swap whereas for higher value it will use swap as much as possible. For most systems, the default value is set to 60. One can check the value of swappiness by reading the file /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
Change the value using
echo 70 /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
or using
sysctl -w vm.swappiness=70
Go ahead and change swappiness from 60 to 100.
echo 100 /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
and verify the value from the file swappiness.
Make all the changes persistent
Now that the swap is been created & added to the system and the swappiness is set, it’s time to make all the changes persistent on every boot. The swapfile on the SD-card will remain as it is, but swapon should be run and desired value of swappiness is to be set. Some shell scripts should do these jobs. drewhill77 has already uploaded shell scripts for variety of purpose.
swapon
As swapfile should be added to system after a boot, it is better to add this command to system’s init. The best place is the /data/local/userinit.d/ directory. If you scan the content of /etc/init.d/90userinit file, it looks for user init files under the directory /data/local/userinit.d/. Create the directory if it does not exist.
mkdir -p /data/local/userinit.d
and add the shell script 99swapon with below lines.
#!/system/bin/sh sleep 75 swapon /mnt/sdcard/swapfile.swp sysctl -p
Line 1 is the shebang line which identifies the file as a shell script.
Line 2 is the sleep command with sleep interval of 75 seconds before it executes line 3 which actually adds swap. SD-card is always mounted at the end. As a result it is safe to add swap with some intervals after system boots. Make the file executable.
chmod +x /data/local/userinit.d/99swapon
swappiness
The second thing is to set default swappiness value. It can be done from /etc/sysctl.conf file. /etc is write protected and it has to be remounted as writable before creating a file.
busybox mount -o remount,rw /system
and add below line in the file /etc/sysctl.conf. Create a new file if does not exist.
vm.swappiness=100
58MB of free RAM after adding swap.
Reboot the phone and you should have swap added with swappiness of 100. Read last section of drewhill77 post for a brief note on swapping.