Setup Guide: Raspberry Pi | Upgrade Problems

Upgrading a Raspberry Pi to a new OS version can sometimes cause problems due to the Pi's limited SD card storage size. Here are some solutions.

Slowness / File System Filled up

After upgrading from Raspbian wheezy to Raspbian jessie, the system ran very slowly. Just logging in took a long time, command execution was sluggish, and after a few minutes the file system filled up and things stopped working. It turns out that the upgrade changed the size of the swap file to a size that was much too large for the SD card. The fix was to edit the file /etc/dphys-swapfile (e.g. with 'sudo nano /etc/dphys-swapfile'), changing its last line from

#CONF-MAXSWAP=2048

to

CONF-MAXSWAP=100

That changed the swap file size from unlimited (because the line was originally commented out) to 100 MB. After that change and a reboot, the system stabilized and ran at its normal speed.

Wasted Disk Space

After upgrading and fixing the Slowness problem above, the root filesystem was still fairly full - 'df .' reported 77% full. The fix was:

$ sudo apt-get clean
$ df .
Filesystem     1K-blocks    Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root        6581636 3593648   2630612  58% /

That removed some files in /var/cache/apt that were used during the upgrade but are no longer needed.