Micro Instance out of memory - add swap

I was trying to update my Symfony project and I got the following while I was trying to update the database schema or assets:

Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'ErrorException' with message 'Warning: proc_open(): fork failed - Cannot allocate memory in

An Amazon EC2 micro.t1 instance only has 613MB RAM. It is not enough to run a lot of processes.

What I can do is to 1) switch to a small instance or 2) add a 1GB swap in disk.


Here are the commands to add a 1GB swap


sudo /bin/dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/swap.1 bs=1M count=1024

1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 34.1356 s, 31.5 MB/s

sudo /sbin/mkswap /var/swap.1

Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 1048572 KiB
no label, UUID=9cffd7c9-8ec6-4f6c-8eea-79aa3173a59a

sudo /sbin/swapon /var/swap.1


To turn off the swap do the following:

sudo /sbin/swapoff /var/swap.1