Swap memory increase with swap file (How to create)

Swap Memory is a space in the Hard Disk of your computer that Operating Systems (Linux in our case) will use to put the info that is actually on the RAM to free it for another application.

This should be done when the system needs memory for a new process and there is none, so we can see that if our system has plenty of RAM it will maybe need no SWAP memory.

How much Swap Memory do I need?

As a rule of thumb if you have 512 MB RAM put 1 GByte Swap, but this stops being true when the limit at least in x386 PCs is achieved (2 GB or swap is the maximum I could ever allocate to a System).

How do I create Swap.

Usually when you install Linux you reserve a partition to be used as swap memory, and the rest of the disk for your files, but what happens if I need more swap memory?. How to create more swap memory?

If you disk is full you can try to shrink the partitions to make room for another swap partition but an easier way is to make a swap file, so now the question is.

How to create a swap file?

dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=100000
This will create file (swapfile) of size 100 MB (round)
mkswap /swapfile
add this file to your swap pool
swapon /swapfile

This will do the job, now you have 100 more Mbytes of swap memory.

related notes:
How to manage swap memory
Swap partition vs swap file