Today when I tried to compile an opensource software in my DigitalOcean VPS, I encountered a weird problem: every time when I make it, the command ends with error message Killed. However, I didn’t press CTRL+C all the time. Then I keyed in command top and I saw gcc used up my memory! So I decided to add a swap file to enlarge my memory. Since DigitalOcean uses SSD for storage, swap won’t make system “too slow”.
First, check how much space that is still available in my server.
df -hl
Next, we add a file for swap.
sudo fallocate -l 1G /myswap
This command means we make a file of 1G.
Then we make that file as our swap file.
mkswap /myswap
swapon /myswap
#check
swapon -s
#you should see your swap file "myswap" here if you succeed
#let it automatically mounted when system starts
vim /etc/fstab
#in this file, append the following line at the end of the file
#/myswap swap swap defaults 0 0
#give appropriate privilege
chown root:root /myswap
chmod 0600 /myswap
Now, the memory should be extended by 1G. And I successfully re-compiled the software.
Update Jul. 25, 2021:
You can actually use an entire disk as swap, by following steps:
sudo mkswap /dev/xvdf
sudo swapon /dev/xvdf
and you can automatically mount the device as swap on startup by adding below to /etc/fstab:
/dev/xvdf none swap sw 0 0