Memory usage - default X install can't use yum with 1GB RAM machine

[James Antill]

On Thu, 2007-10-11 at 15:34 -0400, Paul Wouters wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> This isue is problably known, but I wanted to bring it up anyway.
> 
> ExecSum: Running a 64bit Fedora 7 Test 2 with 1GB RAM fails to update

 Yes, we want yum to use less memory and be faster, hoever...

> Long story: Yum failed me while trying to update from rawhide today:

 Not quite.

> Transaction Summary
> =============================================================================
> Install     50 Package(s)
> Update     702 Package(s)
> Remove       1 Package(s)
> 
> Total download size: 976 M
> Is this ok [y/N]: y
> Downloading Packages:
> [...]
> Transaction Test Succeeded
> Running Transaction
>   Updating  : libgcc                       ################### [   1/1461]
> error: Couldn't fork %post: Cannot allocate memory
> 
> The system was running X with default daemons. Memory usage shows this
> as the top five users:
> 
> Tasks: 137 total,   2 running, 135 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
> Cpu(s): 10.6%us,  1.3%sy,  0.0%ni, 88.1%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
> Mem:   1013676k total,   782344k used,   231332k free,     8788k buffers
> Swap:   522104k total,   452872k used,    69232k free,   164116k cached

 You have 522MB of Swap, and 450MB is used. Add more swap. You may also
find that you have a lot of dead memory due to updated files. prelink
esp. is great for this.
 I've attached a simple python script I've used, it's not perfect but it
shows roughly how much dead memory you have and will kind of show where
it is.

> When yum died, i checked the above usage, so it looks like yum tried to
> use more then 300Mb of non shared RAM. That's pretty insane. Worst thing,
> is that it had *completed* all the dependancy checks, so I'm a bit confused
> why it still needs so much memory. All it needs at that point (it was
> installing the 1st rpm), is the list of 752 package filenames in an
> install-order list. Why is that taking up 300MB?

 300MB to upgrade 1GB of data is excessive?

-- 
James Antill -- <james.antill at redhat.com>
"Please, no.  Let's not pull in a dependency for something as simple as a
string library." -- Kristian Høgsberg <krh at redhat.com>
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