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I'm curious if there's a way to create virtual memory for an Android phone. I have a 4gb mirco sd card in my phone.
Any ideas?

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Yes. You can partition your SD card and add a swap space to it; I have this on my G1. However, it's fairly complicated voodoo. (link is for G2, but instructions should be good for most phones; however, you should probably search XDA for whatever your phone is to be sure)

Swapper 2 from the market will do this for you, apparently. I haven't tried it myself, I use a custom ROM that has it built in.

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  • Alright, I've never heard the term 'swap space' what is that? Nov 13, 2011 at 18:34
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    @James Litewski: That is a partition used by the system for storing memory sections that have been long time not used which disburdens the main memory. It is the Linux equivalent of the Windows file pagefile.sys - if you know what that is.
    – Robert
    Nov 13, 2011 at 18:48
  • I'm running a Mac.. Lol. Nov 13, 2011 at 19:21
  • Swap space is what you asked about: virtual memory. As @Robert mentioned, on Windows it's called pagefile.sys; OSX uses empty space on the boot partition. Most Linux distros (of which Android is one) use a separate partition, called the swap partition. If you have a partitioning tool just pop your SD card into your computer, fire up the tool, shrink the FAT32 partition, and add a swap partition to the end (512MB is probably enough). If the preceding doesn't make any sense to you, you're probably better off just living with your phone as it is.
    – Logos
    Nov 13, 2011 at 22:33
  • Even if you don't think the OP should do this, this post would be much improved with the "how". Nov 15, 2011 at 23:10

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