This is not a tutorial!
Recently my ubuntu become very slow. After use uptime, I have found that the load average is quite high. Sometimes it’s goes 10.32, 9.41, 6.88, and much much higher, even more then 15.0 today.
Originally I don’t really care this issue because I could still work. Although the fan still operting on full-speed. But this is very annoying while it’s stops me to continue my work.
At first, I just removed the unity and reinstalled it. But this only imporved several days. Until today it’s bumped a warning message to told me that the disk is almost full and needs to be check.
Because I just checked my vm and find nothing could be deleted. So I started to try to expend my disk space from other source. After installed addition gigabytes, the problem finally comes: I have free space on machine, but I can’t use it.
Some direct way to solve this is just create a new partition, and mounted on the system. But I want to expand my boot partition, and there are swap area also running on my system. So the first thing is jsut make swap off.
For simplicity, I just use the GUI tool called Disks to remove swap off. The buttons shell changed in the future, so I won’t describe how did I make it. Now I got a totally free partitions at the end of my disk. The problem should soon approached to my desired result. Huh? Just install the app Gparted and everything just like a peice of cake.
The sad thing is Gparted does not allow people like me to shrink disk while it is partitioned as bootable flag. So I need use a live CD built-in version, which will be run as on another OS. To make my machine boot on by the live CD is another bothering work. First I need change the BIOS settings to make it able to boot with CD. Then I could login the Guest OS provided by Ubuntu.
Finally, the Gparted runs a long time check for my boot partition, and extend the new space for me. I also create a swap space at the end of my disk. The story just not over since the swap space needs to be activated.
So now turns to be the most geeky part of this article, that how to setup the swap space on command line tool:
My swap is on partition /dev/sda2
sudo mkswap /dev/sda2
blkid /dev/sda2 # this will generate an UUID string, copy without qoutes
sudo swapon -U <UUID from previous step>
sudo vim /etc/fstab # important! change the UUID for your swap, it's differentI don’t know if this is helped. But after reboot, my load-average just comes back to 0.1, 0.09, 0.11, somewhat like the peaceful old days.