Ensure your SSDs are mounted on /mnt
# mount -l
Add a 8GB swapfile to /mnt
# cd /mnt # /bin/dd if=/dev/zero of=swapfile bs=1M count=8192 # chown root:root swapfile # chmod 0600 swapfile
Activate your new swapfile
$ mkswap /mnt/swapfile $ swapon /mnt/swapfile
I symlink tmp to the mnt directory as well…
# mkdir /mnt/tmp # chown -R root:root /mnt/tmp # chmod 1777 /mnt/tmp # ln -s /mnt/tmp /tmp
Ensure both these are happy at reboot by adding/modifying these lines in /etc/fstab
/dev/xvd[X] /mnt ext3 defaults,usrquota 0 0 /mnt/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0
PS: If you haven’t got any ephemeral storage attached to your EC2 instance, you’ll need to create an AMI from that instance, modify the attached volumes and create a new box attaching the EBS drives to it. A little bit of downtime, but hopefully worth it for the snappy swap space.
Ref:
http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/5.1/Deployment_Guide/s2-swap-creating-file.html
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/InstanceStorage.html#Using_AddingDefaultLocalInstanceStorageToAMI
