EPEL can not be used in Rocky9

I have a fresh installation of Rocky9 and want to download some packages from EPEL, so I’ve done these operations to set up the repository, but it is still unusable as outputs shows:

dnf config-manager --set-enabled crb
dnf install epel-release
dnf clean all
[root@brown ~]# dnf check-update
DigitalOcean Agent                                                                                                                                                                                             11 kB/s | 5.7 kB     00:00
DigitalOcean Droplet Agent                                                                                                                                                                                    3.0 kB/s | 2.9 kB     00:00
Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 9 - x86_64                                                                                                                                                                 14 MB/s |  15 MB     00:01
Killed

as you see I can not use it, what is the problem, and how can I fix it?

Hey!
That’s very weird, because I just have been using it :thinking:

Seeing the Killed there, anything running on your side that kills dnf? Or is it running that long that dnf times out?

DNF working ok when i disable epel, but before showing Killed, dnf freezes for a few seconds. also checked memory usage but everything looks normal

Update: during the freeze it’s not possible to kill the process by ctrl + c

Can you do:

dnf repolist

so we can see all the repositories that you have enabled? I also use EPEL on Rocky 9 and it’s not a problem for me either. So there’s something weird on your machine I think.

here it is

[root@brown ~]# dnf repolist
repo id                                                                                                  repo name
appstream                                                                                                Rocky Linux 9 - AppStream
baseos                                                                                                   Rocky Linux 9 - BaseOS
crb                                                                                                      Rocky Linux 9 - CRB
digitalocean-agent                                                                                       DigitalOcean Agent
droplet-agent                                                                                            DigitalOcean Droplet Agent
epel                                                                                                     Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 9 - x86_64
extras                                                                                                   Rocky Linux 9 - Extras

also tried disabling DigitalOcean Agent and DigitalOcean Droplet Agent but nothing changed, still same error

That was the same as what I was going to suggest. If you do this, is it any better?

dnf clean all
dnf update
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Tbh that’s really odd, because it’s really just another repo with a metalink as path,
maybe it helps to do --verbose or increase the debug level.

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solution:
Apparently, the problem was the amount of server RAM, i had 0.5 GB ram in total so added 2 GB swap file, and now it’s working with no problem.

grumbling:
Which is interesting how much ram one single repository might need!
Also it doesn’t make sense that this process was killed after the RAM consumption exceeded 80%. which left 20 percent unused

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Hmm yeah, minimum requirements are actually 2GB ram, so you were way way down there. You can get away with 1GB if you remove all the ssd* packages. 512MB is not enough for Rocky to run.

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The issue is not going to be EPEL specifically, but rather just adding one more repository at that stage was enough to push you OOM, think of it as the straw that broke the camel’s back.

512M is not enough to run EL9 in, you really need more. DO should not be selling EL9 instances with only 512M, that is madness.

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