npm install gets killed

24 Jan 2016

The following happended on a DigitalOcean 512 MB VPS running Ubuntu 14.04.3.

My package.json looks pretty non-hardcore to me.

{
  "private": true,
  "devDependencies": {
    "gulp": "^3.8.8",
    "stringify": "^3.2.0"
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "angular": "^1.4.8",
    "angular-payments": "^1.0.7",
    "angular-resource": "^1.4.8",
    "angular-route": "^1.4.8",
    "angular-sanitize": "^1.4.8",
    "angular-ui-bootstrap": "^1.0.3",
    "bootstrap-sass": "^3.0.0",
    "jquery": "^2.2.0",
    "jquery-ui": "^1.10.5",
    "jquery.viewport": "^0.1.0",
    "laravel-elixir": "^4.0.0",
    "ng-file-upload": "^11.1.1"
  }
}

Issue

Running npm install --verbose ends with

npm verb about to build /home/username/html/node_modules/laravel-elixir/node_modules/partialify
npm info build /home/username/html/node_modules/laravel-elixir/node_modules/partialify
npm verb afterAdd /home/username/.npm/is-glob/2.0.1/package/package.json not in flight; writing
npm verb afterAdd /home/username/.npm/normalize-path/2.0.1/package/package.json not in flight; writing
npm verb readDependencies loading dependencies from /home/username/html/node_modules/laravel-elixir/node_modules/gulp-uglify/node_modules/uglify-js/package.json
npm verb write writing to /home/username/html/node_modules/laravel-elixir/node_modules/gulp-babel/node_modules/through2/node_modules/readable-stream/package.json
Killed

getting Killed at random steps.

Cause

Looking into kern.log gives this:

Jan 23 19:05:18 server1 kernel: [135502.129029] Out of memory: Kill process 16877 (npm) score 627 or sacrifice child
Jan 23 19:05:18 server1 kernel: [135502.129095] Killed process 16877 (npm) total-vm:1484264kB, anon-rss:313692kB, file-rss:0kB

So its running out of memory, I didn’t know npm was this memory hungry.

Solution

Now we have to either increase server’s memory and/or add swap.

Adding a 1GB swap file.

Full Details: DigitalOcean Post

sudo fallocate -l 1G /swapfile
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile
echo "/swapfile   none    swap    sw    0   0" >> /etc/fstab

and it worked. I upgraded the server as well, more ram is always better ;)