yum stucks on update centos 5.6

Question

I have the following situation with my CentOs 5.6 64 bit:

[root@host ~]# yum update
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror

..and thats it. Nothing comes back, ctrl+c does not have any effect, it's getting stuck.

Any thoughts what to look after?

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S. Cobbs · Answer 1 · 2011-05-18 22:49:29Z

up vote 3 down vote

try yum clean all first and then yum update

answered May 18 '11 at 22:49

feedback

dmourati · Answer 2 · 2011-05-18 23:35:28Z

I'm guessing you are running a virtual machine or you are otherwise restricting yum's memory footprint.

If this is the case, you are simply running out of memory. You can try:

ulimit -m unlimited 
ulimit -v unlimited
yum --noplugins update

If that does not work, please post the output from top after pressing M to sort by memory utilization.

I would probably also want to add some swap space anyway, by creating a swapfile (dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile.dat bs=1k count=512000; mkswap /swapfile.dat; swapon /swapfile.dat), then adding it to /etc/fstab.

2 Answers