Hi I'm working on my bachelor thesis and for that I need to host a node.js web application on AWS, in order to avoid costs I'm using a t1.micro instance with 30GB disk space (from what I know it's the maximum I get in the free tier) which is barely used. But instead I have problems with memory consumption, it's using all of it.

I tried the approach of creating a virtual swap area as mentioned at Why don't EC2 ubuntu images have swap? with these commands:

    sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/swapfile bs=1M count=2048 &&
    sudo chmod 600 /var/swapfile &&
    sudo mkswap /var/swapfile &&
    echo /var/swapfile none swap defaults 0 0 | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab &&
    sudo swapon -a

But this swap area isn't used somehow. Is something missing in this approach or is there another process of reducing the memory consumption in these type of AWS instances?

Bottom-line: This originates server freezes and crashes and that's what I want to stop either by using the swap, reducing memory usage or both.