I too questioned the swap file space when my info says it was always empty. it turned out that the swap file maximum space should be double your ram, I have 1024 meg ram, so I set the swap space to 2048 meg.
When the sysinfo reported that the file was empty, I did some searching for debian and fond that the swap file maximum it will use is 128 meg, and also if you have 512 meg or more ram, then you do not need a swap file.

I repartitioned the drive and my system is running happily without a swap file.