I'm using a VPS for some computationally heavy tasks but not to host a publicly-facing website. The author of the application I'm using recommends running the jar with 8GB of RAM, but adding those physical resources to my instance would quadruple the hourly cost of running the server.
I have a lot of free space on the instance's SSD. Is it feasible to create a large (8GB) swap file in order to increase the effective memory for computation? Someone wrote in another answer that swapping to SSD is an order of magnitude slower than RAM. I only use this server for offloading computing from my personal machine. Being billed by the hour, I can therefore kill the instance the moment I have my results.
If increasing RAM would cost 4x more, would using swap instead take 10x longer and therefore cost 10x more?