Re: ram-error when using apt-get install or dselect

[Stefan O'Rear <stefanor@cox.net>]

On Fri, Sep 03, 2004 at 07:55:47PM +0200, Richard Palfalvi wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have installed Sarge on my laptop and I am running often into the
> following problem when I try to install packets with apt-get or also
> with dselect.
> 
> Usually if there more than one packet to install or update dpkg shows
> the following error-message during configuring the packets downloaded:
> 
> not enough ram available to continue (or configure) the packets you have
> chosen to install (or something like this) - to many errors during
> installation process - stopping the installation.
> 
> I never had this kind of errors with other debian-installations before!
> 
> I have an extra /var-partition with 1.5GB space, and my laptop has 128MB
> of RAM. Why is this not enough when it worked with former
> installations???

I'm going to guess one of the following:

1. Some program you're running is hogging memory.

   Run top, then hit Shift-M.

   Note that top often gets confused by:

   1. mmap
      
      Your Xserver will almost invariably be listed as the biggest
      memory hog, but it isn't usually.  Subtract the amount of RAM on
      your video card to get a better reading of Xfree's memory use.

      36M != 4M.

   2. Threads

      Look at this:

 2428 stefan     0   0 29100  28M 17376 S     0.0 22.8   1:44 /usr/bin/galeon-bin http://sources.redhat.com/bzip2
 2517 stefan     0   0 29100  28M 17376 S     0.0 22.8   0:00 /usr/bin/galeon-bin http://sources.redhat.com/bzip2
 2518 stefan     0   0 29100  28M 17376 S     0.0 22.8   0:01 /usr/bin/galeon-bin http://sources.redhat.com/bzip2
 2519 stefan     0   0 29100  28M 17376 S     0.0 22.8   0:00 /usr/bin/galeon-bin http://sources.redhat.com/bzip2
 2604 stefan     0   0 29100  28M 17376 S     0.0 22.8   0:01 /usr/bin/galeon-bin http://sources.redhat.com/bzip2
24645 stefan     0   0 29100  28M 17376 S     0.0 22.8   0:00 /usr/bin/galeon-bin http://sources.redhat.com/bzip2

      If you see a bunch of processes with the same name and memory use,
      chances are only one is using memory.

   3. Shared data
      
      If you have 20 Perl programs running, there will only be one copy
      of /usr/bin/perl in memory.

2. Swap
   Installing packages shouldn't need swap, but if you have much less
   than you used to, some programs will run out of memory. (Due to
   design constraints, Linux will SIGKILL any program that wants memory
   when you are out of both RAM and swap, so make sure you (can) have
   more swap then you'll use.)

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