Create and use swap on aws instance (or any other ubuntu machine)

AWS_SWAP.md

Platform: Ubuntu 16.04

1. It is common practice to create swap that equals to your RAM. So firstly, you should find out your RAM:

free -m

Which outputs like:

              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:          32046       18549        4831        1273        8665       11644

In my case RAM = 32046 (mb). So the amount of swap should be around that value. The command to determine RAM automatically:

free -m |sed -n 2p| awk '{print $2}'

2. After you've found your $SWAP_SIZE you can add swap:

sudo /bin/dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/swap.1 bs=1M count=${SWAP_SIZE}
sudo /sbin/mkswap /var/swap.1
sudo chmod 600 /var/swap.1
sudo /sbin/swapon /var/swap.1
sudo bash -c "echo '/var/swap.1 swap swap defaults 0 0' >> /etc/fstab"