Creating Swapfiles

Question

I have a Pi3 hooked up with a WDLabs PiDrive

I have Raspbian Lite installed on the drive and in trying to run some docker images simultaneously some of the images processes are being "killed" with a 137 exit code which is an out of memory error.

I'm assuming it could be the partition or swap size might be too low of size?

I tried creating a swapfile size and got the following output

sudo dphys-swapfile setup

want /var/swap=1024MByte, checking existing: deleting wrong size file (104857600), generating swapfile ... of 1024MBytes

sudo dphys-swapfile swap on

swapon: /var/swap: swapon failed: Input/output error

What does this mean? Should I try to increasing or decreasing my swapfile? Is the RAM being overloaded? How can i create a swapfile on the PiDrive. I think it does this already but how can I be sure?

Answer 1

It's possible that the swap file is still set on the SD card. The process I would use is

• sudo dphys-swapfile swapoff
• sudo nano /etc/dphys-swapfile
• Set the value of CONF_SWAPFILE in to point to your hard disk mount / partition on the HDD and REMOVE the # at the start of the line
• Set the value of CONF_SWAPSIZE to the size you want
• sudo dphys-swapfile setup
• sudo dphys-swapfile swapon

Answer 2

To be 100% sure of an memory overload Error try those commands:

1. docker ps -a to find your Container ID

2. docker inspect "your Container ID".

   • look for the line with OOMKILL
   • If OOMKILL shows you a true it is 100% a Memory Problem

Another Problem for you Memory Problem could be possible your Docker log. My Image has writing mass lines of outputs into my Docker logs which was the reason why i´ve recieve an error Code:137 as well

source: https://github.com/DistributedSystemsGroup/zoe/issues/28 + Experience