Can the Mender server run with less than 2 GB of ram?

General Discussions
1

Hi guys,

I finally finished installing a mender server on an EC2 instance. One thing I struggled with is that it had a hard time running on a free tier t2.micro 1GB of ram instance. ./run ps would take a little while to show what’s going on (20-30seconds), and sometimes wouldn’t work at all and would show this kind of message :

~/mender-server/production$ ./run ps
^[[1;5FTraceback (most recent call last):
  File "bin/docker-compose", line 6, in <module>
  File "compose/cli/main.py", line 71, in main
  File "compose/cli/main.py", line 127, in perform_command
  File "compose/cli/main.py", line 740, in ps
  File "compose/cli/formatter.py", line 24, in table
  File "compose/cli/formatter.py", line 14, in get_tty_width
  File "os.py", line 980, in popen
  File "subprocess.py", line 729, in __init__
  File "subprocess.py", line 1295, in _execute_child
OSError: [Errno 12] Cannot allocate memory
[18407] Failed to execute script docker-compose

Bumping it up to a t2.small instance with 2GB of ram easily fixed this problem and now it’s working well. Just putting it here since either

  1. I was doing something wrong and it should work fine with 1GB of ram
    or
  2. 2GB is somewhat of a minimum requirement, in which case it could be good to add to the documentation.
2

Check out this entry:
https://docs.mender.io/2.0/troubleshooting/mender-server#mender-conductor-service-fails-to-start-in-production
and see if it helps.

3

My Mender server runs on a VM with 2 GB of ram, while also running a couple of other services, and the machine still having room to spare (it currently runs an MSSQL docker container, a postgres container, our cloud service).

To be honest, we don’t have too much devices linked yet…