A great way to increase swap on ubuntu

The article is copied from ubuntu community as it is .

In case you don't want or you're not sure how to create a swap partition, you can create a swap file which will work in the same way as partition. Here are the steps (using terminal):

1. Create an empty file (1K * 4M = 4 GiB).
   

   sudo mkdir -v /var/cache/swap
   cd /var/cache/swap
   sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=swapfile bs=1K count=4M
   sudo chmod 600 swapfile
   

2. Convert newly created file into a swap space file.
   

   sudo mkswap swapfile
   

3. Enable file for paging and swapping.
   

   sudo swapon swapfile
   

   Verify by: swapon -s or top:
   

   top -bn1 | grep -i swap
   

   Should display line like: KiB Swap: 4194300 total, 4194300 free
   To disable, use sudo swapoff swapfile command.
4. Add it into fstab file to make it persistent on the next system boot.
   

   echo "/var/cache/swap/swapfile none swap sw 0 0" | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab
   

5. Re-test swap file on startup by:
   

   sudo swapoff swapfile
   sudo swapon -va
   

   ^{Note: Above commands re-checks the syntax of fstab file, otherwise your Linux could not boot up properly.}