Check current memory and swap status sudo swapon --show This will list you list of swap if available currently on your system. You can verify no swap memory by running free command and see swap usage, should be 0. free -h Check available hard drive storage for swap To check free hard drive space, you can run following command and see if enough space is available for swap usage. df -h Creating swap file Now since we are aware of available space in our system, you can now choose size of the swap. Usually 1x or 2x size of your RAM is ideal for swap memory. to create swap first we need to allocate memory and create file for specified size sudo fallocate -l 2G /swapfile This will quickly create 2G of file which we will turn into swap. we can verify correct file size by running command ls -lh /swapfile Output -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.0G Mar 11 11:14 /swapfile Enable swap file Before enabling swap on this file, we need to lock this file so that no other user than root can access/modify this. sudo chmod 600 /swapfile Verify permission using ls -lh /swapfile Output -rw------- 1 root root 1.0G Apr 25 11:14 /swapfile Now we can mark this file as swap using following sudo mkswap /swapfile Output Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 2 GiB (2147479552 bytes) no label, UUID=95040bf9-5847-4c5c-acee-d1258b272e61 After making swap, lets enable swaping on this file. sudo swapon /swapfile Verify the same using sudo swapon --show output NAME TYPE SIZE USED PRIO /swapfile file 2G 0B -1 Now check and verify from free command free -h Output total used free shared buff/cache available 990M 356M 207M 52M 425M 397M Swap: 2.0G 0B 2.0G Make swap permanent Thats it for the session, but this will not be permanent swap, once we reboot it, this storage will get deleted. To make swap memory permanent, we need to update /etc/fstab file. Before updating, first take backup of existing file. sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bak Add the swap file information to the end of your /etc/fstab file by typing: echo '/swapfile none swap sw 0 0' | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab Wow, you have done it. You can stop here for most of the cases and your swap is ready to be used by your operating system. Adjusting Swappiness settings Swappiness settings means the configuration which will allow kernel to decide when to save file to swap. this value varies from 0–100. Where 0 means kernel will not store anything in swap unless absolute necessary, and 100 means kernel can use it very often. Based on your requirement, you can configure this value. To check your current value, type cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness output 60 You can adjust this setting using sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=10 This setting will stay until next reboot, to make changes permanent, we will save this value to file. Edit following file. sudo nano /etc/sysctl.conf At the bottom of this, add vm.swappiness=10 Save and close the file. You are done.