About Linux Swapping Linux RAM is composed of chunks of memory called pages. To free up pages of RAM, a “linux swap” can occur and a page of memory is copied from the RAM to preconfigured space on the hard disk. Linux swaps allow a system to harness more memory than was originally physically available. However, swapping does have disadvantages. Because hard disks have a much slower memory than RAM, server performance may slow down considerably. Additionally, swap thrashing can begin to take place if the system gets swamped from too many files being swapped in and out. Check for Swap Space Before we proceed to set up a swap file, we need to check if any swap files have been enabled by looking at the summary of swap usage. swapon -s   If nothing is returned, the summary is empty and no swap file exists. Check the File System After we know that we do not have a swap file enabled, we can check how much space we have on the server with the df command. The swap file will take 512MB— since we are only using up about 7% of the /dev/hda, we can proceed. df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/hda 20642428 1347968 18245884 7% / Create and Enable the Swap File Now it’s time to create the swap file itself using the dd command : sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=512k   “of=/swapfile” designates the file’s name. In this case the name is swapfile. Subsequently we are going to prepare the swap file by creating a linux swap…