How to add swap to an EC2 instance

Swap should take place on the Instance Storage (ephemeral) disk and not an EBS device. Swapping will cause a lot of IO and will increase cost on EBS. EBS is also slower than the Instance Store and the Instance Store comes free with the EC2 Instance.

It will usually be mounted to /mnt but if not run

sudo mount /dev/xvda2 /mnt

To then create a swap file on this device do the following for a 4GB swapfile

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/swapfile bs=1M count=4096

Make sure no other user can view the swap file

sudo chown root:root /mnt/swapfile
sudo chmod 600 /mnt/swapfile

Make and Flag as swap

sudo mkswap /mnt/swapfile
sudo swapon /mnt/swapfile

Add/Make sure the following are in your /etc/fstab

/dev/xvda2      /mnt    auto    defaults,nobootwait,comment=cloudconfig 0   2
/mnt/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0

and lastly enable swap

sudo swapon -a