Here is an easy trick that you can use for adding swap temporarily to a Server, VMs or Workstations, if you are in an emergency.

In this case I had a cluster composed from two instances running out of memory.

I got an alert for one of the Servers, reporting that only had 7% of free memory.

Immediately I checked it, but checked also any other forming part of the cluster.

Another one appeared, had just only a bit more memory than the other, but was considered in Critical condition too.

The owner of the Service was contacted and asked if we can hold it until US Business hours. Those Servers were going to be replaced next day in US Business hours, and when possible it would be nice not to wake up the Team. It was day in Europe, but night in US.

I checked the status of the Server with those commands:

# df -h

There are 13GB of free space in /. More than enough to be safe as this service doesn’t use much.

# free -h
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           5.7G        4.8G        139M        298M        738M        320M
Swap:            0B          0B          0B

I checked the memory, ok, there are only 139MB free in this node, but 738MB are buff/cache. Buff/Cache is memory used by Linux to optimize I/O as long as it is not needed by application. These 738 MB in buff/cache (or most of it) will be used if needed by the System. The field available corresponds to the memory that is available for starting new applications (not counting the swap if there was any), and basically is the free memory plus a fragment of the buff/cache. I’m sure we could use more than 320MB and there is a lot if buff/cache, but to play safe we play by the book.

With that in mind it seemed that it would hold perfectly to Business hours.

I checked top. It is interesting to mention the meaning of the Column RES, which is resident memory, in other words, the real amount of memory that the process is using.

I had a Java process using 4.57GB of RAM, but a look at how much Heap Memory was reserved and actually being used showed a Heap of 4GB (Memory reserved) and 1.5GB actually being used for real, from the Heap, only.

It was unlikely that elastic search would use all those 4GB, and seemed really unlikely that the instance will suffer from memory starvation with 2.5GB of 4GB of the Heap free, ~1GB of RAM in buffers/cache plus free, so looked good.

To be 100% sure I created a temporary swap space in a file on the SSD.

(# means that I’m executing this as root, if you type literally with # in front, this will be a comment)

# fallocate -l 1G /swapfile-temp

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile-temp bs=1024 count=1048576 status=progress
1034236928 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 4.020716 s, 257 MB/s
1048576+0 records in
1048576+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 4.26152 s, 252 MB/s

If you ask me why I had to dd, I will tell you that I needed to. I checked with command blkid and filesystem was xfs. I believe that was the reason.

The speed writing to the file is fair enough for a swap.

# chmod 600 /swapfile-temp

# mkswap /swapfile-temp
Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 1048572 KiB
no label, UUID=5fb12c0c-8079-41dc-aa20-21477808619a

# swapon /swapfile-temp

I check that memory is good:

# free -h
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           5.7G        4.8G        117M        298M        770M        329M
Swap:          1.0G          0B        1.0G

And finally I check that the Kernel parameter swappiness is not too aggressive:

# sysctl vm.swappiness
vm.swappiness = 30

Cool. 30 is a fair enough value.

2022-01-05 Update for my students that need to add additional 16GB of swap to their SSD drive:

sudo fallocate -l 16G /swapfile-temp
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile-temp bs=1024 count=16777216 status=progress
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile-temp
sudo mkswap /swapfile-temp
sudo swapon /swapfile-temp