thinking sysadmin

EC2 micro instances come with no swap by default – at least every micro instance that I’ve ever launched does, I’m not sure if it’s theoretically possible to launch an instance with swap. The lack of swap is probably a side-effect of the limited memory combined with EBS-only storage and concomitant risk of high EBS charges if you swap heavily.

However, if you’re willing to accept the risk of unexpected high EBS I/O costs, it’s straightforward to add swap:

# /bin/dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/swap.1 bs=1M count=1024
# /sbin/mkswap /var/swap.1
# /sbin/swapon /var/swap.1

Or, if you prefer Puppet:

class swapfile {

  exec { "create swap file":
    command => "/bin/dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/swap.1 bs=1M count=1024",
    creates => "/var/swap.1",
  }

  exec { "attach swap file":
    command => "/sbin/mkswap /var/swap.1 && /sbin/swapon /var/swap.1",
    require => Exec["create swap file"],
    unless => "/sbin/swapon -s | grep /var/swap.1",
  }

}

Paul Manning, from VMware, in response to a question I asked in the VI:OPS forums:

The current best practice for NFS is to not seperate the VM swap space from the VMhome directory on a NFS datastore. The reason for the originial recommendation was just good old fashioned conservitiveness.

More at the forum post, including more on the reasoning for the old recommendation of separating swap when using NFS – thanks, Paul, you made my day.