hey! I'm using ec2 with nvme drive I'm wondering does it make sense to add swap since we're close to filling memory as a temporary fix in case we spill over to buy time for resizing? or is there a better way

Adding swap is definitely a temporary measure to keep at least searches working. Writes will soon start getting rejected. So you want to scale up disk size as soon as possible.

ok thank you! Is it safe to create swap before running into the issue or better to leave it off? not sure how that works if it will get used instead of ram. we're currently using 64gb server with 10gb to spare with current data but I'm not sure how long we have before we spill over

It's safe to add swap even before running into the issue. How soon the swap gets used depends on your kernel swapiness setting

ok I see reading up on it now thank you!