Emergency Swapfile: when your memory fills up

The original post is about swap files rather than swap partitions. Both are used for the same purpose, but as stated in the post title "Emergency Swapfile", swap files tend to be best used for emergency situations or specialty needs (for example, when partitioning the drive is not possible for one reason or another). If you ARE able to re-partition the drive space, then far more efficient performance-wise is the swap partition (or even better yet, a swap DRIVE if you have a speedy but small-ish spare drive laying about somewhere). This will surely give much better performance than using a swap file, especially when dealing with sizes in the multi-gigabyte ranges. Of course, as the other reply to this post states, you should also consider carefully the size of your required swap space as well. 16 gigabytes does seem a bit extreme unless you are using insane amounts of RAM for some really intense application.