I’m trying to rebake 45k posts because I’ve changed the S3 CDN URL and it keeps running out of memory and killing it. I read this about setting up a swapfile… [image] Create a swapfile for your Linux server Self-Hosting bulb For servers with <= 4GB of RAM, running ./discourse-setup will prompt for and automatically create a 2GB swapfile. Most cloud virtual machine providers do not set up swapfiles as part of their server provisioning. In particular, upgrading Discourse produces a lot of memory pressure. With a swap file, rather than randomly terminating processes with an out of memory error, things will slow down instead. Having a swap file is a cheap insurance policy that protects you from many other lo… The first two commands went fine… Create an empty swapfile install -o root -g root -m 0600 /dev/null /swapfile write out a 2GB file named ‘swapfile’ dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1k count=2048k But then on mkswap /swapfile it gave me an error… mkswap error swapfile is mounted will not make swapspace I tried this instead… [image] Installation Error Self-hosting What you get from free df -h The install script has detected you have less than 2G of RAM and less than 2G of swap, and is trying to create a swapfile. According to the source, it doesn’t deal with the case where there is an existing swapfile. Probably you should remove the existing swapfile and try again. This might be enough: swapoff /swapfile && rm /swapfile free swapoff /swapfile && rm /swapfile and got this error… swapoff: Not superuser I’m on a Digital Ocean Droplet, so I guess I don’t have the necessary permissions for that? Hitting those blocks, I tried instead to just rebake uncooked posts running… rake posts:rebake_uncooked_posts It will run several hundred, maybe a few thousand if I’m lucky, then kills off again. After babysitting it since yesterday, I’m half baked. :wink: Is there a way to run a rebake command that is throttled? I don’t care if it takes a while, overnight or whatever, I just want it to stop failing. Any help would be much appreciated.

Oddly enough I let the uncooked run again while I was writing all of that up. Left for a long lunch with some friends and came back to it being 100% done. I’m not sure if the swapfile finally started working or if it was just a low use coincidence of timing, but… [image] done, finally! Maybe if someone has an answer, it can help someone else or me on the next go round.

[image] DavidO: swapoff: Not superuser On ubuntu: Sudo -i On Debian Su -

Thanks. Not sure if I did it right or not. [image]

[image] DavidO: Any ideas on the rebake throttling? I have never seen rebake being throttled, it is asynchronous, it queues the jobs which are processed in the background.

OK, thank you. Mine finished the rebake for now, so I’ll consider myself lucky and stop messing with it. :smiley:

[image] DavidO: So that’s at the ubuntu: base level and not the ubuntu:/var/discourse level? Warning :warning: : don’t do things blindly on a production site, there is a strong chance of things going wrong without any real way to recover them. no, it’s not the ubuntu: level. Did you do a ./launcher enter app before trying to create swap? If yes, that what you shouldn’t have done. When you first log on to your server is the host, when you enter app, you’re performing actions inside the container. the swap needs to be created on the host, the application lives inside the container, this is what you will access to run the rebake command.

OK, thanks for the guidance. Our forum is just a group of friends and has good backups, so if I roast it for a week or so, we’ll just have to suffer through GroupMe. :wink:

[image] DavidO: mkswap error swapfile is mounted will not make swapspace This means that you already have a swapfile, it’s called /swapfile, and it’s in use. If you want to make it bigger, you can stop your container, then unmount it, and then use that dd command to make it bigger, and then the mkswap command. If someone else reads this, the way that I do it is to grep swap discourse-setup and look at the commands there. It’s a slightly easier version of what to do.

Throttle rebake to keep from running out of memory?

Product Support

itsbhanusharma (Bhanu Sharma) January 7, 2026, 8:26pm 5

That doesn’t look right. Which instructions are you following?

And why are you creating swap inside the container? Swap is meant to be created on the host not inside the container.

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Throttle rebake to keep from running out of memory?

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