How to increase memory (RAM) on DigitalOcean Droplets for free

Troubleshoot

npm install won't complete. It tries, but ending up throwing errors as follows;

npm ERR! code ENOMEM
npm ERR! syscall spawn
npm ERR! errno -12
npm ERR! spawn ENOMEN

This is because the machine doesn't have enough memory. Happened to me with a VPS from DigitalOcean which was provisioned with 1GB of RAM. 1GB may not enough for a Gatsby app. High memory usage was observed for a build process too.

Solution

A swap file can be a solution. I wondered if the droplet had it set up?

Check

free -m

And the output suggested that there is no swap file provisioned. This is how the output looked;

       total  used   free   shared   buff/cache   available
Mem:   492    109    280    4        102          366
Swap:  0       0     0

So we need to set up a swapfile.

Allocate 1GB to swap file

sudo fallocate -l 1G /swapfile

I could have done with 2GB, but I allocated 1GB for my droplet.

Set appropriate permissions for the swap area file

sudo chmod 600 /swapfile

Setup the swap area using the space allocated above

sudo mkswap /swapfile

Enable the swap area

sudo swapon /swapfile

Veify that swap area has been enabled

sudo swapon -s

Output

Filename    Type     Size       Used     Priority
/swapfile   file     2097148    44088    -1

To make the swap file permanent, we need to add it to /etc/fstab file. Add the following line to the /etc/fstab file.

/swapfile   none    swap    sw    0   0

After doing all the above, npm install start to be completed successfully.

Gatsby's build process completes a lot faster now 🤗

Reference: increasing-memory-ram-on-digitalocean-droplets