What is the porcess to add swap to an EC2 Instance

Question

I'm running an ec2 micro instance and i've been finding that the instance occasionally runs out of memory. Other than using a larger instance size, what else can be done?

Answer 1

If you are finding problem with your storage then you can simply do the following steps to add upto 1GB to your instance:

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

To enable it by default after reboot, add this line to /etc/fstab:

/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0