Swapping like gangbusters!

So occasionally kswapd will start going whole hog. In combination with Chromium
running and a make -j N job running, the system would slow wayyyyyy down,
with kswapd trying to find a swap partition that did not exist (my bad!).

There's a daemon called swapspace in the Debian repository. But I decided to
try making a swapfile first. Here are the steps ("#" indicates a root prompt or
the use of sudo):

# fallocate -l 4G /swapfile             [or see the "dd" command below]
# chmod 600 /swapfile
# mkswap /swapfile
# swapon /swapfile
# vi /etc/fstab, and add:

    /swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0    [to make the change permanent at boot]

# swapon --show                         [to verify]

Alternate command:

    # dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=4194304

Imma go with this for awhile and see how it goes. If you try it, don't blame me
if it fscks up your system :-D

--
The most important early product on the way to developing a good product
is an imperfect version.