YUM Problems on Small VPSes

[PeterHutnick]

I have a 96MB VPS running FC3. Yum was killing my ssh connection (with the message "hangup") and running the system out of memory.

It seems that the default swap on 96MB VPSes is 64MB. Not enough for a system that's doing stuff other than running yum.

So, if you're having weird problems with yum try increasing your total available memory (i.e. make a swap file), run "yum clean all" to get rid of junk left over from yum crashing, then run your update/install again.

Also, the default yum.conf file has some repos you might not want (like Livna and some Java thing) enabled by default. Commenting those guys out can only help.

Hope this helps someone. It wasn't fun getting here ;-)

-Peter

PS: Anyone know how to get the system to start using a swap file automatically at boot? UDEV has me totally confused!

-P

[retep]

Hi. We preinstall all our servers with apt. You may find that apt uses a lot less memory than yum, and runs faster to boot. e..g we use apt all the time on 64MB VPSs without a problem.

[tomchuk]

The following will create a 256MB swap file as /swap, and add it to the fstab so that it is activated on boot.


dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap bs=1M count=256
mkswap /swap
swapon /swap
set -o noclobber # make absolutely sure you don't clobber fstab
echo "/swap swap swap defaults,noatime 0 0" >> /etc/fstab


Edit: but yeah, apt > yum