SUNWfrk’s Blog

I had a slight problem when upgrading my RPM’s on my VPS (which I got from belGOnet and I can fully recommend!!) Most of the time ‘yum update’ failed to work and exits with this error

[root@rogue ~]# yum update
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/bin/yum”, line 29, in ?
yummain.user_main(sys.argv[1:], exit_code=True)
File “/usr/share/yum-cli/yummain.py”, line 309, in user_main
errcode = main(args)
File “/usr/share/yum-cli/yummain.py”, line 178, in main
result, resultmsgs = base.doCommands()
File “/usr/share/yum-cli/cli.py”, line 345, in doCommands
self._getTs(needTsRemove)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/depsolve.py”, line 101, in _getTs
self._getTsInfo(remove_only)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/depsolve.py”, line 112, in _getTsInfo
pkgSack = self.pkgSack
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/__init__.py”, line 661, in
pkgSack = property(fget=lambda self: self._getSacks(),
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/__init__.py”, line 501, in _getSacks
self.repos.populateSack(which=repos)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/repos.py”, line 232, in populateSack
self.doSetup()
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/repos.py”, line 79, in doSetup
self.ayum.plugins.run(‘postreposetup’)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/plugins.py”, line 179, in run
func(conduitcls(self, self.base, conf, **kwargs))
File “/usr/lib/yum-plugins/fastestmirror.py”, line 181, in postreposetup_hook
all_urls = FastestMirror(all_urls).get_mirrorlist()
File “/usr/lib/yum-plugins/fastestmirror.py”, line 333, in get_mirrorlist
self._poll_mirrors()
File “/usr/lib/yum-plugins/fastestmirror.py”, line 376, in _poll_mirrors
pollThread.start()
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/threading.py”, line 416, in start
_start_new_thread(self.__bootstrap, ())
thread.error: can’t start new thread

The answer is (again) more simple then you might expect. Thus, before you start reinstalling python or start rebuilding your yum database try this and modify this file as following: /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/fastestmirror.conf

[main]
enabled=1
verbose=0
socket_timeout=3
hostfilepath=/var/cache/yum/timedhosts.txt
maxhostfileage=10
#this was set to 15 and causes problems on a VPS which is mostly limited in the number of concurrent threads
maxthreads=5
#exclude=.gov, facebook

After this ‘yum update’ should be working again. if you are still running out of threads you can put the enabled flag to zero and this will disable the fastestmirror plugin.