How do I hibernate with swap file without swapping?

Question

Well, I know that my question title is not clear so I'll explain. .

Background: I have a laptop with dead battery. (Won't even charge) It also have dead hard drive. (Thrown away) And have 1000MiB RAM just to let you know for walk through.

So I decided to use a 16GB USB stick with single flash chip to install Lubuntu 15.10. It is working great although the stick is a bit of bottle neck since it only have one chip.

I knew if I made swap partition on it, it would slow down even worse so I decided to not make one. .

Problem: I wanted to hibernate my computer but I couldn't without a swap file or swap partition. I can't use stanby 'cause battery is dead. Swap file will try to write quite a bunch of data so it will slow down the computer and kill my USB faster. .

Question: How can I make a swap file for hibernate only? I want to hibernate my computer but don't want to it to start using swap for "performance boost."

If there is possible solution, could I get a walk through of it?

Answer 1

First of all: a warning as you're saying:

the stick is a bit of bottle neck since it only have one chip.

Which makes me suppose you're using an MLC USB stick. These sticks are slow and prone to errors, so one day in the near future, you're going to wake up and find that you've got no system at all and all of your data is lost, as HDDs die a slow, painful death like cancer, whereas SSDs just suddenly stop working like a heart attack!

Therefore:

1. Install your stick for the moment like here
2. Buy an SLC USB stick ASAHP and re-install on that one
3. Make back-ups of your data from the SLC stick onto the MLC stick...

Data isn't data until it's backed up!

Answer 2

My computers have lots of RAM, so I never have seen swap space being used to supplement it. I do use hibernate often so I still define more swap space than I have RAM. Never noticed this slowing down my computer, but have never tried benchmarking it. Are you sure using swap space actually slows you down.