Fixing the "E: Dynamic MMap ran out of room" error.

Added a number of sources to /etc/apt/sources.list today looking for an update to bacula. When I ran apt-get update to have the system load the package lists from the remote servers, I got back this error:

  • Reading Package Lists…
  • E: Dynamic MMap ran out of room
  • E: Error occured while processing libvte9 (NewVersion1)
  • E: Problem with MergeList
  • /var/lib/apt/lists/debian.lcs.mit.edu_debian_dists_unstable_main_binary-i386_Packages
    E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.

Turns out this is a fairly innocuos error that means simply that I need to raise the limit on the size of the cache that apt-get is using. Edit /etc/apt/apt.conf or create a new file in /etc/apt.conf.d/ (I made a file – called it 30cachelimit) and put this line into it:

APT::Cache-Limit "20000000";

This tells apt that it may use 20MB of diskspace to make it’s memory map (MMap) of the package lists. That’s plenty.

Credit to Valery Dachev on whose blog I first found the solution. Thanks, Valery!

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