How to increase the swap space available in the boot2docker virtual machine?

Question

I would like to run a docker container that requires a lot of memory on a machine that doesn't have much RAM. I have been trying 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

Following 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 5G of memory on a machine that only has 4G of physical memory?

Answer 1

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

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