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

Paul Wouters paul at xelerance.com
Thu Oct 11 19:34:29 UTC 2007


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

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

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

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 3983 paul      20   0 1002m 284m  19m R  9.9 28.7  32:17.87 firefox-bin
 2582 root      20   0  568m 106m 4680 S  0.7 10.8 198:43.15 X
 2931 paul      20   0  351m  24m 7496 S  0.0  2.5   7:38.91 gnome-terminal
 2883 paul      20   0  288m  15m 8064 S  0.0  1.6   8:34.15 wnck-applet
 2859 paul      20   0  267m  11m 9264 S  0.0  1.2   0:10.26 puplet

Firefox had 3 pages open, nothing special (eg news pages). I was running
8 xterms, with either a bash command prompt, vi on a small file, or ssh.

That alone takes up 406MB of my 1GB of ram. Looks a bit excessive to me.

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?

Paul




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