Dynamic MMap ran out of room error on Debian

Posted February 5th, 2008 in Linux/Unix/BSD

A few days ago I was wanting to install some new software onto a Debian 3 box that I have inherited the support for. After running "apt-get install dhcp-client" I got the following error message:

Reading Package Lists... Error!
E: Dynamic MMap ran out of room

What this error means is that the cache which stores Debian's apt cache is not big enough to hold all the information and it needs to be increased. The solution is to simply increase the size of the cache by editing the /etc/apt/apt.conf file and adding the line below:

APT::Cache-Limit 16777216;

If the /etc/apt/apt.conf file does not exist, then create it with the line above in it.

The numeric value after APT::Cache-Limit is the size in bytes for the cache. The value I have specified in the example is 16MB. You may need to increase it on your system if the value is not high enough and you continue to get the "Dynamic MMap ran out of room" error.

After setting the value in the file, you should be able to run your apt-get command again without any issues.