If you still have a mechanical hard drive, you can often hear it constantly accessing. The computer can keep swapping in and out, a process known as thrashing, making it appear unresponsive. If your system is using all of your RAM, the computer may run into performance problems when using virtual memory. You can make changes to your system as necessary. Still, twice the physical memory is a good starting point and an insurance policy if you make greater demands on the memory. You might want to use a swap file if you're running Linux in a virtual machine, on a small embedded system, or you just don't want to repartition your existing Linux system. The partition scheme suggested by the installer is usually adequate on a single-user Linux desktop.

This is the best choice for a Linux desktop or a server. The choice is easy: in most circumstances, you should use a partition. You might wonder when you should use a swap file or a dedicated partition for your swap space. You can then use the mkswap and swapon commands with a swap file as you would with a swap partition: sudo mkswap /path/to/swapfile The /dev/zero device is a special device that outputs '0.' What this dd command does is create a blank two-gigabyte block file using 1024-kilobyte blocks suitable for use as swap space. fallocate is the preferred method for this reason. Make sure you're using the dd command correctly, as getting the infile and outfile wrong can cause data loss.

Linux memory usage