How do I allocate memory to work as swap space in an Amazon EC2 instance by using a swap file?

I want to allocate memory to work as a swap file in an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance. How do I do that?

When physical RAM is already in use, Amazon EC2 instances use swap space as a short-term replacement for physical RAM.

Contents of RAM that aren't in active use or that aren't needed as urgently as other data or instructions can be temporarily paged to a swap file. This frees up RAM for more immediate use.

You can also create swap space on a partition. For more information, see How do I allocate memory to work as swap space on an Amazon EC2 instance using a partition on my hard drive?

Note: It's a best practice to create swap space only on ephemeral storage instance store volumes.

Calculate the swap space size

As a general rule, calculate swap space according to the following:

Note: Swap space should never be less than 32 MB.

Create a swap file

1.    Use the dd command to create a swap file on the root file system, where "bs" is the block size and "count" is the number of blocks. In this example the swap file is 4 GB:

2.    Update the read and write permissions for the swap file: 

3.    Set up a Linux swap area: 

4.    Make the swap file available for immediate use by adding the swap file to swap space: 

5.    Verify that the procedure was successful: 

6.    Enable the swap file at boot time by editing the /etc/fstab file:

RHEL - Creating a Swap File

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Published: 2018-08-30

Updated: 2019-01-09