Runing dnf package manager on Linux with small memory

Running dnf package manager can sometimes be difficult on Linux hosts with small memory. I observed on a Rocky Linux 9 with 1 GB RAM after enabled epel, and dnf install would sometimes be killed due to OOM.

To address this issue, we can create and enable a swap space:

$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile count=1024 bs=1MiB
$ sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
$ sudo mkswap /swapfile
$ sudo swapon /swapfile
$ sudo dnf update

Once done, we then turn off the swap space:

$ sudo swapoff /swapfile

Reference

This idea come from this Stackoverflow post.