Use a portion of your SSD drive as additional memory

You can use a swapfile as a temporary addition to your system memory within the Linux environment. With an SSD drive, you can utilise a storage space swapfile and take advantage of the SSD's read/write performance.

First, create the file itself with:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=1024

This command will create a file named swapfile inside your root folder, its content being all zeroes and size of 1024 megabytes (1 GB). To make it 2 GB, change the count value to 2048.

Next, make it readable and writable by root only with:

sudo chmod 600 /swapfile

Then format it as swap with:

sudo mkswap /swapfile

Enable the file using:

sudo swapon /swapfile

You can disable it at any point using the sudo swapoff /swapfile command and remove it at will. Since we don't add it to the /etc/fstab file here, it won't be added at the next boot, so you can remove it after rebooting.

To have the swap automatically mount at boot time, insert the following line in /etc/fstab:

/swapfile    none    swap    sw    0   0