Introduction One of the easiest ways to make your server more responsive, and guard against out-of-memory errors in your application, is to add some swap space. Swap is an area on a storage drive where the operating system can temporarily store data that it can no longer hold in memory. This gives you the ability to increase the amount of information that your server can keep in its working memory, with some caveats. Reading from and writing to swap is slower than using memory, but it can provide a good safety net for when your server is low on memory. Without swap, a server that runs out of memory may start killing applications to free up memory, or even crash. This can cause you to lose unsaved data or experience downtime. To ensure reliable data access, some applications require swap to function. In this guide, we will cover how to create and enable a swap file on a CentOS 7 server. Note Although swap is generally recommended for systems utilizing tradition...