How to increase swap space on boot2docker virtual machine?

Question

I would like to launch a docker container that requires a lot of memory on a machine that doesn't have much RAM. I tried to increase the swap space available for the container to no avail. Here is the last command I tried:

docker run -d -m 1000M --memory-swap=10000M --name=my_container my_image 

After these tips on how to check memory metrics, I found the following:

 $ boot2docker ssh docker@boot2docker :~$ cat /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/docker/35af5a072751c7af80ce7a255a01ab3c14b3ee0e3f15341f7bb22a777091c67b/memory.stat cache 454656 rss 65015808 rss_huge 29360128 mapped_file 208896 writeback 0 swap 0 pgpgin 31532 pgpgout 22702 pgfault 49372 pgmajfault 0 inactive_anon 28672 active_anon 65183744 inactive_file 241664 active_file 16384 unevictable 0 hierarchical_memory_limit 1048576000 hierarchical_memsw_limit 10485760000 total_cache 454656 total_rss 65015808 total_rss_huge 29360128 total_mapped_file 208896 total_writeback 0 total_swap 0 total_pgpgin 31532 total_pgpgout 22702 total_pgfault 49372 total_pgmajfault 0 total_inactive_anon 28672 total_active_anon 65183744 total_inactive_file 241664 total_active_file 16384 total_unevictable 0 

Is it possible to run a container that requires 5 GB of memory on a computer that has only 4G of physical memory?

Answer 1

This GitHub issue was very helpful in determining how to increase the swap space available in boot2docker-vm. Adapting it to my situation, I used the following commands for ssh in boot2docker-vm and set up a new swap file:

 boot2docker ssh export SWAPFILE=/mnt/sda1/swapfile sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=$SWAPFILE bs=1024 count=4194304 sudo mkswap $SWAPFILE sudo chmod 600 $SWAPFILE sudo swapon $SWAPFILE exit