So I have a VPS with about 700MB RAM but the available is < 100MB. Today when I do
yum update
I got the error saying
xxxx: [Errno 5] [Errno 12] Cannot allocate memory
So I solved this by update everything one by one using the following command:
for item in $(yum list updates | tail -n+8 |awk '{print $1}'); do sudo yum update $item -y; done
The solution comes from https://commandlinelog.wordpress.com/2014/09/28/yum-update-on-low-ram/.