[kbar13]

....what?

You should not consider swap space as additional memory. The performance of swap, even on SSD, cannot compare to RAM.

> Secretly wants you to switch to larger droplets

They operate a business where they get more money if you switch to a larger plan. What, do you think they want EVERYONE to stay on the $5/month plan?

Running out of memory is an issue of not being able to tune your stack correctly, and not being able to scale your application correctly. This is not the fault of Linux, mysql, or your hosting provider. It is your inability to plan ahead and prepare.

[illumen]

Except every other provider enables swap by default.

I understand another reason why they don't do it though... SSD has a very low amount of writes available, and if low mem machines are swapping all the time, then the SSD will wear out much more quickly.

Another annoying thing is that they disabled resizing the SSD space used. So now, when people upgrade from say 20GB to 30GB there is no easy way to do it. They did used to do this, but they disabled the easy interface for it. So lots of people upgrading are not getting what they paid for, or expected (easy upgrades of VMs).

[tgeek]

"Except every other provider enables swap by default."

This is false and 100% incorrect.

Most AMI's on AWS don't enable SWAP by default whether supplied by a 3rd party or AWS themselves. Its not a forced thing either way.

In October Rackspace announced that they would be getting rid of SWAP by default: http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/changes-to...

Linux VM's in Azure don't have Swap by default: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2013/07/29/swap...

On any host, physical or not, with more than 2GB of RAM people haven't run SWAP for years now. On cloud providers, even hosts with less than 2GB it is rarely worth it. It has horrible performance ramifications even when backed by SSD for the local host and any other tenants on that shared host.

This isn't a scam or them trying to upsell you. This is smart people who know systems operations making the right call for their customers.

[Volundr]

Actually Linode is the only one I know of that does. Rackspace, many EC2 images, Chunkhost, etc all leave swap disabled by default.

[falcolas]

AWS micro instances do not have swap or overcommit enabled by default. Caused me problems when trying to run a Go program.

[camus2]

> Except every other provider enables swap by default.

then why dont you switch to another one? if other providers are better?