yum and memory

[Vu Pham]

My server has 1 G of memory and 2g of swap.

At the time I had the problem posted in this email, the memory snapshot
was as below.
Mem:   1034840k total,   900176k used,   134664k free,     3708k buffers
Swap:  2031608k total,   285212k used,  1746396k free,   350240k cached

When I ran yum to install screen, I got the below error and one of the
messages is "cannot allocate memory" while there were plenty of memory,
at least more than 1 g of swap.

Then I wrote a test program that asked for 1 G of memory and it ran just
fine. "top" also showed a lot of swap space allocated when the test
program ran ( I let it sleep for 5 seconds so I can see top status ).

Why does yum complain about memory ?

Or maybe the problem is something else ? I just got to FC some days ago
so I must be wrong somewhere.

Thanks,

Vu


[root at home2 ~]# yum install screen
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
rpmdb: Lock table is out of available locker entries
rpmdb: Unknown locker ID: 7ee
error: db4 error(22) from db->close: Invalid argument
error: cannot open Packages index using db3 - Cannot allocate memory
(12)
error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/yum", line 29, in <module>
    yummain.main(sys.argv[1:])
  File "/usr/share/yum-cli/yummain.py", line 82, in main
    base.getOptionsConfig(args)
  File "/usr/share/yum-cli/cli.py", line 146, in getOptionsConfig
    errorlevel=opts.errorlevel)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/yum/__init__.py", line 153, in
_getConfig
    self._conf = config.readMainConfig(startupconf)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/yum/config.py", line 601, in
readMainConfig
    yumvars['releasever'] = _getsysver(startupconf.installroot,
startupconf.distroverpkg)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/yum/config.py", line 664, in
_getsysver
    idx = ts.dbMatch('provides', distroverpkg)
TypeError: rpmdb open failed