Swap Space

During the life of your PC you most probably will be adding more physical RAM to it, in which case you may want to also increase the amount of swap space, swap space is disk space that is reserved for memory usage, the same as a paging file in Windows.
If your kernel needs more memory than what your physical RAM can produce it will write data to your swap space and use it as RAM, people will argue on how much swap space you should make available, some seem to think that if you add enough ram you don't even need swap space however this is not a good idea since swap space is always used no matter how much RAM your system has, Linux will always move infrequently used programs and data to swap space even if you have Gigabytes of Ram. Since Hard disk costs are so low I always stick to the rule of thumb with regards to how much swap space is enough, no matter how much physical Ram I add to my system I always increase my swap space accordingly up to a maximum of 4Gb (I never make swap space bigger than 4GB no matter how much RAM I have). The rule of thumb is that you should have double the amount of swap space available as the physical RAM on your computer. If you have 1GB of physical RAM then you should allocate 2GB of your hard drive to swap space.

Swap space is configured during installation but you can easily add more at anytime.

There are 2 methods of adding swap space to your system the one method is to create a partition of the swap space type and allocate that partition to swap space. The other way is to create a file of the required size (like a paging file) and then allocate that file to swap space.

To use the partition method you will need to create the partition using fdisk
create the partition to the size that you want to allocate as swap space and then set the partition id to type 82
once the partition is created issue the following command
mkswap -L SWAP-hda7 /dev/hda7

were hda7 is the the partition that you created

edit your /etc/fstab file and add the following entry

LABEL=SWAP-hda7 swap swap defaults 0 0

Save your /etc/fstab file and then issue the following command to read it into memory and turn it on
swapon -a

Done

Option 2,: To use a file instead of a partition, lets say you want to add a 2GB swapfile to your system
type
dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024M count=2

this will create a 2GB sized file called /swapfile
then type
mkswap -L SWAPFILE /swapfile
then edit your /etc/fstab file and add the following entry

LABEL=SWAPFILE swap swap defaults 0 0
save your /etc/fstab file
and then type
swapon -a to read the file into memory and turn on all swap entries

you can check your swap status by typing
swapon -s