On the test I will create a SWAP partition in Ubuntu Server.
So, we think what size of the paging file we need and create an empty file:
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=1024
In my case, 1 Gigabyte is specified, bs can be specified in K, M, G or simply in bytes without letters.
The size of the paging file is usually roughly equal to the size of the RAM, if there is a lot of RAM, then in this case you can do without it.
Let’s show the system what this swap-file is:
sudo mkswap /swapfile
Connect it:
sudo swapon /swapfile
To disable it, you can use the command:
sudo swapoff /swapfile
Let’s see the result by typing the following commands:
swapon -s
free
top
Information about the SWAP size should appear.
To automatically connect swap at system startup, open the /etc/fstab file, for example, in the nano editor (Ctrl+X to exit the editor, y/n to save or cancel changes):
sudo nano /etc/fstab
And add at the end of the line:
/swapfile none swap sw 0 0
Done, the swap file is active and will automatically connect when the system starts.
See also my article:
Linux Partitioning