rpmdb: Lock table is out of available locker entries

05.27.2007 | Author: major | Posted in Posts

If up2date throws some horrible Python errors and rpm says “rpmdb: Lock table is out of available locker entries”, you can restore your system to normality with the following:

The errors:

rpmdb: Lock table is out of available locker entries
error: db4 error(22) from db->close: Invalid argument
error: cannot open Packages index using db3 - Cannot allocate memory (12)
error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm

Make a backup of /var/lib/rpm in case you break something:

tar cvzf rpmdb-backup.tar.gz /var/lib/rpm

Remove the Berkeley databases that rpm uses:

rm /var/lib/rpm/__db.00*

Make rpm rebuild the databases from scratch (may take a short while):

rpm --rebuilddb

Now, check rpm to make sure everything is okay:

rpm -qa | sort

Why does this happen?
When rpm accesses the Berkeley database files, it makes temporary locker entries within the tables while it searches for data. If you control-c your rpm processes often, this issue will occur much sooner because the locks are never cleared.

Update: As of February 2009, this post received five times the visits of my next most popular post. This situation must happen very often!

37 Responses

  1. RPM Database Rebuild at S C ^ 2 August 25th, 2007 at 1:17 pm

    [...] did some research, and I found this guy’s website. Very helpful indeed, and a fellow RHCE. His tips did the trick. I’m going to spell [...]

  2. major August 25th, 2007 at 3:13 pm

    Glad I was able to help!

  3. suvi August 6th, 2008 at 9:59 pm

    It’s really helpful. :-)

  4. Schenker August 8th, 2008 at 4:26 am

    Thanks! That helped me too! Great description and solve of the problem!

  5. 6log » Blog Archive September 9th, 2008 at 4:39 am

    [...] source: Racker Hacker [...]

  6. Aniraka October 20th, 2008 at 8:35 am

    This tip is very helpful

  7. CFusion November 4th, 2008 at 12:20 am

    hi,
    worked very good with me

    thanks alot

  8. CHernández November 27th, 2008 at 10:12 am

    Worked fine!!

    Thanks

  9. greenpossum December 1st, 2008 at 7:40 pm

    Another thanks from me!

  10. Gael December 2nd, 2008 at 11:53 am

    Thanks from me as well :-)

  11. Allen December 4th, 2008 at 12:30 pm

    Did the job for me as well, thanks!

  12. evilrouters.net » Blog Archive » rpmdb: Lock table is out of available locker entries December 8th, 2008 at 1:04 am

    [...] So, what to do? Google, of course! Fortunately, major over at Racker Hacker encountered this same issue about a year and a half ago and has already provided the fix for us: [...]

  13. major December 8th, 2008 at 6:34 pm

    I’m really glad to hear that this fix has helped so many people!

  14. Emil December 12th, 2008 at 9:42 am

    Great stuff, thank you very much. Saved my day :D

  15. Jim December 12th, 2008 at 4:54 pm

    You the man. Many thanks.

  16. Piero Bacarella January 8th, 2009 at 2:54 pm

    Great!! Now it works! :-)

  17. Farid Saad January 14th, 2009 at 1:25 pm

    Thanks Major, great stuff!! Now back to the original problem I was trying to solve….

  18. informe February 2nd, 2009 at 7:37 am

    Precious major :)

  19. Dario February 18th, 2009 at 8:20 am

    Did the trick, thanks!

  20. Sebastien February 23rd, 2009 at 4:29 am

    Thanks a lot for this, saved me a lot of time !

  21. eric greer February 24th, 2009 at 10:27 am

    Thank you!

  22. major February 27th, 2009 at 9:17 am

    Thanks for all of the feedback! I’m glad I was able to help everyone out of this annoying situation!

  23. bramvera March 4th, 2009 at 9:01 am

    u rock!! fixing my stressful yum server

  24. Cyber-Surfer March 19th, 2009 at 8:39 am

    Thanks.. Solved the problem.. unlike the gits over at CPanel.net….

  25. Noob April 2nd, 2009 at 10:34 am

    Thanks for this article, help fixed the problem for me :)

  26. SagittariusA April 2nd, 2009 at 11:13 am

    Thanks a lot ! You saved another guy ! ;-)

  27. Trophaeum April 9th, 2009 at 7:44 am

    and herein lies why i hate rpm distros, oh well, at least its an easy fix!

  28. Kyle April 23rd, 2009 at 10:45 am

    @Trophaeum:

    Because other package management tools don’t use DBs that could have locking issues?

  29. oilcanharry May 10th, 2009 at 7:35 am

    “tar cvzf rpmdb-backup.tar.gz /var/lib/rpm”

    Now which file(s) do I delete that I backed up? Is it…

    __db.001
    __db.002
    __db.003

    Thanks.

  30. Steph May 15th, 2009 at 4:27 am

    Thanks a lot it helps me a lot :)

  31. daniel June 3rd, 2009 at 10:50 pm

    muchas gracias desde chile. thanks

  32. wildbill June 9th, 2009 at 1:06 am

    Thx! this really helps

  33. Matt June 9th, 2009 at 10:46 pm

    Thanks for the fix, I’m not sure if this was the case with other people, and the reason why it started showing up more frequently recently, but my server uptime is nearing 3 years and this problem just showed up. Could be totally unrelated!

  34. Daniel June 22nd, 2009 at 3:42 pm

    Many thanks, you saved my night :)

    Daniel

  35. rpmdb: Lock table is out of available locker entries June 24th, 2009 at 2:18 am

    [...] 參考來源 : rpmdb: Lock table is out of available locker entries [...]

  36. Conchur June 26th, 2009 at 8:07 am

    Thanks for this, fixed one of our servers that was failing to run a cPanel EasyApache update. Tips like these are invaluable to desperate Googlers!

  37. Mark Krenz June 26th, 2009 at 12:46 pm

    A long time ago on a much older version of RedHat (7.x or 8.x series I think), this would happen quite often and you’d have to rebuild the database all the time. For a while, its been fine, now suddenly I’m running into this problem again on RHEL 5 systems. Maybe its a bug regression or something.

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