Many cloud servers don’t come with a swap partition setup by default, including Amazon EC2 servers. Luckily it’s fairly simple to setup. Below were using the file location of /var/swap1 but you can put the swap anywhere you want.
Create a 4 gig file
You can change the 4096 to whatever size you want in megabytes.
sudo /bin/dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/swap1 bs=1M count=4096
Secure swap file
Makes sure that swap file is locked down from prying eyes.
sudo chown root:root /var/swap1
sudo chmod 600 /var/swap1
Turn file into a swap file
sudo /sbin/mkswap /var/swap1
Activate swap file
Let’s the system know about the swap
sudo /sbin/swapon /var/swap1
Turn swap on by default on boot
Edit /etc/fstab and add this line below as the last line in the file.
/var/swap1 swap swap defaults 0 0
