I think my little VPS is OOMing

July 7, 2026

My IONOS VPS has been suddenly going unresponsive lately. I told Gemini I have this VPS for editing files in Neovim, and it suggested I might be running out of memory, especially if I’m running a TypeScript LSP, which is known for hogging lots of resources. It seems to have happened at least a couple times when I’m editing a .ts file, so that’s a good theory.

Add a swap file

The first thing I did was add a swap file so memory can spill over onto disk if necessary. Gemini said to do this with fallocate or dd depending on your filesystem, but after looking into it, I decided to just use dd to be safe. See this Ask Ubuntu thread.

Here’s what I did:

# create the swap file
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/cache/swapfile bs=1K count=4M
# only root should be allowed to read/write the file, since it can hold sensitive data
sudo chmod 600 /var/cache/swapfile
# format the file as swap
sudo mkswap /var/cache/swapfile
# activate the swap file
sudo swapon /var/cache/swapfile
# check the swap status
sudo swapon --show
free -h

Apparently the swap file won’t automatically get re-mounted after system restart, so to fix that, I edited /etc/fstab and added this line to the bottom:

/var/cache/swapfile none swap sw 0 0

/swapfile is the swap file path.
none is the mount point (swap doesn’t get a standard folder mount point).
swap is the filesystem type.
sw is the mount options, telling the system this is for swap.
0 0 are the Dump and Pass options, used for filesystem backups and checks; swap doesn’t need them, so they are set to zero.

If you see any issues with any of the above, please email and educate me!

For some smarter people covering these topics, see:

I believe this will fix the OOM problem, but it’s got me thinking about alternatives to my current rig. More to come on that soon.

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