add vps-addswap

vps-addswap/README.md

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+---
+title: VPS Add Swap
+homepage: https://webinstall.dev/vps-addswap
+tagline: |
+  VPS Add Swap: because a little RAM can go a long way.
+linux: true
+description: |
+  Creates permanent swap space that will be activated on each boot.
+
+  `vps-addswap` will
+
+    1. create a permanent swapfile `/var/swapfile`
+    2. format and activate the swapfile
+    3. add '/var/swapfile none swap sw 0 0' to `/etc/fstab`
+---
+
+### What is `swap`?
+
+Simply put, swap space is a substitute for RAM that lives on a storage drive.
+
+### Why use permanent `swap`?
+
+In a word: Money.
+
+Whereas once upon a time RAM was expensive in real life, now it is very cheap.
+
+In "the cloud", however, RAM is not just expensive - it's very, _very_
+expensive - as in _hundreds_-of-dollars-per-month expensive.
+
+For most applications this isn't a problem because you don't need much RAM - or
+when you do, you need it according to workload, which is easy (and cheap) to
+distribute across many otherwise underpowered server instances.
+
+However, when you need to use Python, R, etc to process large batches of data
+sequentially - such as the multi-gigabyte datasets common in Machine Learning,
+Artificial Intelligience, Data Mining, etc - or when you need a very rare burst
+of RAM for a very short-lived task - such as an `npm run bild`, swap can be a
+big cost saver.
+
+The good news is that quite often you can also have your cake and eat it to:
+most language runtimes (i.e. Node.js, Go, Java, etc) allow you to tune
+parameters that limit the amount of RAM they are allowed to allocate
+dynamically, which means that you can take advantage of large swap space for
+sequential processing tasks without causing your apps to be slow.
+
+### How to allocate swap space?
+
+Typically you should place swap files in `/var`, which is the volume that will
+be optimized for fast writes (on servers that do so).
+
+```bash
+sudo fallocate -l 2G /var/swapfile
+sudo chmod 0600 /var/swapfile
+sudo mkswap /var/swapfile
+```
+
+This method is preferrably to `truncate` and `dd` for SSDs as it will NOT
+actually write the file to its full size, and therefore will be instant.
+
+On an HDD (rotational drive), `dd` may be a better choice, as you need to
+allocate contiguous space all at once.
+
+```bash
+sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/swapfile bs=2G count=1
+```
+
+### How much swap to use?
+
+If you need to run common tasks with `npm run build` - such as compiling
+`sass` - 2G would be a good place to start.
+
+If you need to process large datasets, somewhere between 1x-2x the size of the
+largest dataset should do - noting that the dataset will likely take up more
+space in RAM/swap than as a file on disk.
+
+### How to activate swap space?
+
+```bash
+sudo swapon /var/swapfile
+```
+
+If you get an errors about "holes" or allocations, you'll either need to defrag
+or try allocating far more space than you need with `dd`, delete the dd file,
+and create the swap file again.
+
+### How to activate swap on boot?
+
+You need to open `/etc/fstab` and add a line like this:
+
+```txt
+/var/swapfile none swap sw 0 0
+```

vps-addswap/install.sh

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+#!/bin/bash
+
+{
+    set -e
+    set -u
+
+    default_size=2G
+    my_size=${1:-$default_size}
+
+    # Allocate a swapfile
+    fallocate -l "$my_size" /var/swapfile
+
+    # Only allow root to read it
+    # (this is not sufficient security for sensitive data)
+    chmod 0600 /var/swapfile
+
+    # Activate the swap
+    mkswap /var/swapfile
+    swapon /var/swapfile
+
+    # Cause swap to be activated on boot
+    echo '/var/swapfile none swap sw 0 0' | tee -a /etc/fstab
+
+}