I think for my next update on my two servers, I will use the hosting provider’s flexibility to migrate to larger RAM before updating, and migrate back to my present minimum immediately afterwards. There’s a small amount of extra downtime, but if the rebuild is much quicker then it could be an overall win. The extra expense should be under $1 or perhaps even just 1 cent, for an hour of extra RAM (in my case, from $6 per month to $12 per month, charged hourly on Digital Ocean at respectively 1 cent and 2 cents.)
As noted in the linked thread, sometimes a reboot is helpful in any case, so it’s a good time to update OS packages and reboot, for me.
I’m hoping that this will cause less wear and tear on me, too.
I might in fact choose to go up from 1G to 8G, which will cost an extra 6 cents per hour, to give myself the freedom to delete my swapfile temporarily, and ease the disk space crunch.
Everything peaks at update time - in between times, the present minimal configuration still seems to be adequate.
I can certainly afford 6 cents per upgrade cycle.