I met the same problem when I tried to run a wordpress on my micro instance without RDS.
Adding a Swap page solved the problem for me.
You can follow steps below to setup the swap space.
If it still doesn’t work for you, consider using the RDS service.
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I copied the content of the blog for the record. Credit goes to the blog author pmoubed:
Amazon EC2 Micro Instance Swap Space – Linux
I have a Amazon EC2 Linux Micro instance. Since Micro instances have only 613MB of memory, MySQL crashed every now and then. After a long search about MySQL, Micro Instance and Memory Managment I found out there is no default SWAP space for Micro instance. So if you want to avoid the crash you may need to setup a swap space for your micro instance. Actually performance wise is better to enable swap.
Steps below show how to make a swap space for your Micro instance. I assume you have AWS Account with a Micro instance running.
- Run
dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=1024
- Run
mkswap /swapfile
- Run
swapon /swapfile
- Add this line
/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0
to/etc/fstab
Step 4 is needed if you would like to automatically enable swap file after each reboot.
Some useful command related to SWAP space:
$ swapon -s
$ free -k
$ swapoff -a
$ swapon -a
References: