Problems with Ruby Gems

Posted by paul
Monday, July 24, 2006 20:07:50 GMT

I thought I’d finally take a look at Mongrel and see whether it was worth changing my configuration from Lighttpd/FCGI. So far it’s been pretty stable (with only the odd restart needed every few month or so), but Mongrel’s had such a good response I couldn’t resist.

However, it looks like Ruby Gems is failing to work on my VPS. Below is what I run and the output:

sudo gem install daemons
   Password:
   Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org
   Killed

I was originally on an old version of Gems, so I downloaded the latest release (0.9.0), but same result.

If I run the same above on my PowerBook G4 

pablo:~/work/mephisto/trunk pingles$ sudo gem install daemons
Password:
Attempting local installation of 'daemons'
Local gem file not found: daemons*.gem
Attempting remote installation of 'daemons'
Updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org
Successfully installed daemons-0.4.4
Installing RDoc documentation for daemons-0.4.4...

D’oh. Not too sure what’s causing it, and a quick poke around Google and Google Groups didn’t yield any information about log files etc. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Comments

Leave a response

  1. ian – July 24, 2006 @ 08:27 PM
    let it update and you should be fine.
  2. dgibbons – July 25, 2006 @ 12:12 AM
    Do you have any resource management scripts running that could be seeing the load spike and killing the update? Doing Systems Admin for PLANET ARGON i've tested out a free resource management scripts that would check if something is using too much resources and kill it. Alternatively, how much memory and swap space do you have? I had the issue on one of my home boxes that trying to compile mysql would kick me out of ssh, turns out that I forgot to assign swap space (doh!) and so the compile hit the system limit of ram and called the memkiller process to ahem.. "clear some up" which included the compile and my ssh session. You can check that with the 'free' command.
  3. Chris Hoffman – August 31, 2006 @ 04:28 PM
    Just curious: what VPS are you using?
  4. Paul Ingles – September 01, 2006 @ 10:54 AM
    I use RimuHosting (www.rimuhosting.com). So far they've been pretty darn good - not a bad word to say really.
  5. Daniel Hirsmuller-Counts – June 12, 2007 @ 10:25 PM

    I’m having the same problem and my VPS is with RIMU as well. Whats weird is that I don’t have these problems on the other server I host with them.

  6. brian – June 19, 2007 @ 12:01 AM

    I’m having this problem and i’m wondering if you found a solution.

  7. Paul Ingles – June 19, 2007 @ 06:19 PM

    Hi,

    I think the problem was caused by running out of memory, I killed a few unnecessary things and that seemed to solve the problem.

    Hope that helps

  8. Mark Whitcher – July 09, 2007 @ 09:36 PM

    I had the same configuring a VPS with RimuHosting, but a simple “gem update” fixed it for me.

  9. Rob Kaufman – August 21, 2007 @ 01:59 AM

    I’ve seen this problem on several smaller VPS accounts. Bulk update just wants too much memory. If you upgrade far enough gems wise (I have 0.9.4.3) you can do -B 1000000 during a command (which says update the gems one at a time unless there is more than one million that need updating). This does not flood your memory and get your process killed or hung by the system. Be prepared, this could take a while. Example: sudo gem install -B 1000000 daemons

  10. Jordan Isip – August 28, 2007 @ 04:29 AM

    I had the same problem on my rimuhosting VPS. I just stopped my mongrel clusters to free up some memory then ran gem install again….

  11. Chris – December 20, 2007 @ 02:12 PM

    I ran into a very similar problem on rimuhosting’s rails stack. I free up most of my memory, but still had the same result. Then i ran “gem update –system” it worked after i updated my rubygems. Hope this helps people out.

  12. Ian – February 18, 2008 @ 08:42 PM

    I am getting a memory problem with gem update - using slicehost 256Mb

  13. greenland – April 13, 2008 @ 09:59 PM

    Same as Ian. It’s very common. sudo gem install -B 999999 rails seems to do the trick… at least, it’s very good at producing dots that fill the terminal. i’m still waiting.

  14. Wish list – April 22, 2008 @ 03:32 PM

    Cool, seems to have done the trick for me too (I’m on slicehost 256Mb too). Seems there are a lot of gems that need updating:

    Updating metadata for 9550 gems from http://gems.rubyforge.org/ :)

  15. jaybee – May 04, 2008 @ 01:00 PM

    Thanks a lot to all of you. I am using slicehost 256M too, and I’ve been banging my head all night on that…… i got 12500 dots, and now it works :)

  16. Rachel – June 02, 2008 @ 12:40 PM

    Hey! Excellent site! Very good work webmaster! Best regards! ;)

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