First, let us check what swap devices we have enabled. Check the NAME and SIZE columns of the following command:

$ swapon --show

No output means that there are no swap devices available.

If you ever installed a Linux distro, you may remember creating a separate swap partition. This, however, is only one method of creating swap space. The other is by adding a swap file. Run the following commands:

$ sudo swapoff -a
$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=$((4 * 1024 * 1024))
$ sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
$ sudo mkswap /swapfile
$ sudo swapon /swapfile

$ swapon --show

Just to clarify what we did:

• disabled all swap devices
• created a 4Gb zero-initialized file
• set the permission to the file so only root can edit it
• created a swap area from the file using mkswap (works on devices too)
• activated the swap area

The new swap area is temporary and will not survive a reboot. To make it permanent, we need to register it in /etc/fstab by adding a line such as this:

/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0

In one terminal run vmstat and look at the swpd and free columns.

$ vmstat -w 1

In another terminal, open a python shell and allocate a bit more memory than the available RAM. Identify the moment when the newly created swap space is being used.

One thing you might notice is that the value in vmstat's free column is lower than before. This does not mean that you have less available RAM after creating the swap file. Remember using the dd command to create a 4GB file? A big chunk of RAM was used to buffer the data that was written to disk. If free drops to unacceptable levels, the kernel will make sure to reclaim some of this buffer/cache memory. To get a clear view of how much available memory you actually have, try running the following command:

$ free -h

Observe that once you close the python shell and the memory is freed, swpd still displays a non-zero value. Why? There simply isn't a reason to clear the data from the swap area. If you really want to clean up the used swap space, try the following:

$ vmstat
$ sudo swapoff -a && sudo swapon -a
$ vmstat

Create two swap files. Set their priorities to 10 and 20, respectively.
Include the commands (copy+paste) or a screenshot of the terminal.
Also add 2 advantages and disadvantages when using a swap file comparing with a swap partition.