I am doing a composer update and getting an error "Out of memory: killed process php"

Hi there @kinsleyransom,

What I would usually do if I’m getting that error on a Droplet with 1GB of RAM, is to add swap space, that way you would have some extra buffer in case that your RAM is fully exhausted.

You can follow the steps on how to do that here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-add-swap-space-on-ubuntu-20-04

Hope that this helps! Regards, Bobby

Heya,

All of the experienced issues is because your memory runs out too fast and your Droplet needs to kill processes otherwise it would crash.

The short-term solution would be adding SWAP to your Droplet:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorial-collections/how-to-add-swap-space

What is Swap?

Swap is a portion of hard drive storage that has been set aside for the operating system to temporarily store data that it can no longer hold in RAM. This lets you increase the amount of information that your server can keep in its working memory, with some caveats. The swap space on the hard drive will be used mainly when there is no longer sufficient space in RAM to hold in-use application data.

The information written to disk will be significantly slower than information kept in RAM, but the operating system will prefer to keep running application data in memory and use swap for the older data. Overall, having swap space as a fallback for when your system’s RAM is depleted can be a good safety net against out-of-memory exceptions on systems with non-SSD storage available.

Longterm should be upgrading to a Droplet with more RAM.

Heya,

I’m sorry to hear about your experience. If you’re having issues with processes being killed due to memory issues you can start with examining the logs and also monitor the resource usage on your droplet.

When dealing with out-of-memory (OOM) issues on a Linux server, there are several key logs and tools that can help you diagnose and understand what is causing the memory exhaustion.

The kernel log often contains messages related to memory management, including out-of-memory (OOM) events. These messages can be found in /var/log/kern.log or through the dmesg command.

dmesg | grep -i oom

dmesg | grep -i "out of memory"

grep -i oom /var/log/kern.log

The general system log (/var/log/syslog or /var/log/messages) may also contain useful information about memory issues.

grep -i oom /var/log/syslog

grep -i "out of memory" /var/log/syslog

If a specific application is suspected to be causing the memory issues, check its logs. These logs are often found in /var/log/ or in a directory specific to the application

You can check this article on how to monitor the resource usage on your droplet:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-top-netstat-du-other-tools-to-monitor-server-resources

Adding a swap file can also benefit the performance.

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-add-swap-space-on-ubuntu-22-04

Regards