*** WARNING ***

Using Less Physical Memory will Impact the performance of the Image for every user.  You are making a tradeoff. 

*** WARNING ***

A few customers asked if they could use less memory/RAM to accomplish the same work. Yes, you can. There is a tradeoff. You sacrifice RAM/Processing performance for disk space.

The following code adds a new swapfile to your system. The file should address the gap between the recommended 8GB and the RAM you are removing from the recommended. 8G -> 4G – you should create a swap file of at least 4G.

To get the right size, you’ll have to edit the NUMBLOCKS.  Example is 4G * 1024 * 1024 = 2097152  -> # of 1024 K Bytes.  You’ll have to do the math for each of the different block sizes.

First, you should ssh to the system.

#!/bin/sh
 # createSwapFile.sh - Creates a SWAP File for the QuickStart
 # you can edit the NUMBLOCKS*BLOCKSIZE to match the desired RAM.
 #
 # Reference =
 NUMBLOCKS=2097152
 BLOCKSIZE=1024
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=${BLOCKSIZE}  count=${NUMBLOCKS}
sudo mkswap /swapfile2
sudo swapon /swapfile2

The link to the GitHub Gist is here.

Now that you have turned the swap file on, let’s add it permanently

sudo vim /etc/fstab
Click the "I” key
Use the Arrows to Navigate to the swapfile line
Go to the End
Click the Enter Key
Paste /swapfile2          swap            swap    defaults        0 0
Click Escape Key
Type wq!

You are all set with more memory applied to the system permanently.

References:
[1] https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5/html/Deployment_Guide/s2-swap-creating-file.html