Linode / Nanode - Out of memory, when running yum update

Question

I rented a nanode from linode which is the smallest model. I tried to install powershell core which caused some issues.

Now I got the memory allocation error:

[codingsafari@centosbox ~]$ sudo yum update
CentOS-8 - AppStream                                                                140 kB/s | 4.3 kB     00:00
CentOS-8 - Base                                                                     155 kB/s | 3.8 kB     00:00
CentOS-8 - Extras                                                                    43 kB/s | 1.5 kB     00:00
Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 8 - x86_64                                       33 kB/s |  14 kB     00:00
packages-microsoft-com-prod                                                          28 kB/s | 2.9 kB     00:00
Out of memory allocating 771751936 bytes!
Killed

In retrospective, I think this was the issue all along and now is just the first time i see this useful warning.

Does anyone know if this is expected when using a nanode with no traffic and only nginx running?

[codingsafari@centosbox ~]$ free -m
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            821          77         648           1          95         633
Swap:           511          75         436

Answer 1

dnf (FKA yum) attempted to allocate 730 something MB of memory on a host with 630 MB available. That is going to return out of memory. This package manager is not lightweight.

Disabling some repos temporarily, like EPEL, may help. But only so much, and some transactions require them to be enabled.

Do your updates from an instance with more memory. If you wish to maintain a small memory instance, that may mean creating, updating, and instantiating images (VM templates) regularly.

My just for fun Linode instance has 2 GB RAM, for whatever that is worth.