[moved from Forums->Virtualization]

Several months ago, I bought a small VPS with memory capped at 128MB, bursts to 256MB. It runs CentOS 5. I have no support and self-manage it. Up to now, yum updates have proceeded smoothly.

Now, yum wants to update glibc, which includes -common, -headers, -dev and a couple of others. It fails with a malloc error. I assume it runs out of memory due to the hypervisor denying it any more.

I thought perhaps I would use rpm --nodeps to install each package separately and so work around the memory limit, but rpm just hangs. /var/log/yum.log does not show any entry.

How can I work around a tiny memory limit? Should I even be attempting to update glibc on a hosted VPS?

Thanks.

The CentOS updates stream contains bug fixes and more importantly security patches; thus, I would recommend applying any updates available. The minimum requirements for CentOS 5 256MB, so your are cutting it close. May be you could request a temporary increase of RAM from your VPS provider so you can get the updates installed. Other than that, upgrade to the next package they offer.