Talk: DNF operations use large amount of RAM and may fail in low-memory environments

[kparal (Kamil Páral)]

This is a discussion topic for the following Common Issue:

DNF operations use large amount of RAM and may fail in low-memory environments

Problem The current design of the DNF package manager can cause it to use quite large amounts of memory (into the hundreds of megabytes) for most operations. This can mean that DNF operations fail (due to being killed by the kernel’s out-of-memory handler) in low-memory environments, especially systems or containers with 1GB or less of memory and no swap space. Cause This is due to parsing large amounts of repository metadata, and the exact amount of memory used varies over time and between …

You can discuss the problem and its solutions here, but please note that debugging and technical feedback should primarily go to the issue trackers (e.g. Bugzilla) linked in the Common Issue, because that’s the place that developers watch, not here.

If there are any updates/changes/amendments for the Common Issue description, which you believe should be performed, please post it here.

[kparal (Kamil Páral)]

Please see the Common Issue for solution/workarounds:

DNF operations use large amount of RAM and may fail in low-memory environments

Problem The current design of the DNF package manager can cause it to use quite large amounts of memory (into the hundreds of megabytes) for most operations. This can mean that DNF operations fail (due to being killed by the kernel’s out-of-memory handler) in low-memory environments, especially systems or containers with 1GB or less of memory and no swap space. Cause This is due to parsing large amounts of repository metadata, and the exact amount of memory used varies over time and between …

[bspcsquad (Fred Qian)]

Recently I notice that Amazon Linux (on EC2) uses DNF 4.x as default package manager, but it doesn’t cause problems on even the smallest EC2 instance with 900-ish MB of RAM. However, DNF 4.x causes OOM on Oracle Linux (on OCI), and more than 2GB of swap is needed for the periodic update to work without hanging the instance.
What might be the difference between these two settings? Did Amazon do some magic to the DNF packaged by them?