How to increase SWAP space in linux

Adding more swap space is very easy in Linux, all you need to have is some free hard disk space. Say for some weird reason you need to increase your swap space by say 500MB, then this is how you can go about adding it.

Firstly, create a file of 500MB using 'dd'

dd if=/dev/zero of=/home/swapfile bs=1k count=500000

then set appropriate permissions for the file

chmod 600 swapfile

make it a swap file

mkswap swapfile

and finally activate it

swapon swapfile

That's it, you have just added 500MB of swap space. You can check the swap size using the 'free' command. In future if you want to remove the swap space, then do the following

turn swap off

swapoff swapfile

delete the file

rm swapfile

That's it.