Micro instance hangs during yum update

Question

I've used the CentOS 6 image. Twice, the micro instance (1 vCPU, 0.6 GB memory) hangs during the yum update:

Updating   : selinux-policy-targeted-3.7.19-231.el6.noarch 

CPUs shoots up to 120%. I've waited over 20 minutes, the instance is compeltey unresponsible. I've tried a secod time with a new micro instance, same thing.

Is there any way to keep CentOS up to date on a micro instance?

Answer 1

Julien, are you using a small disk? If so, is it possible that the update is so large that you're exceeding the performance limits on the disk? Please see https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/disks#pdperformance

Answer 2

I've seen the same.

If you do a gcutil getserialportoutput for the instance during the hang you'll see many "Out of memory" errors.

I suspect the 0.6GB of memory is too small, at least for yum update.