I went ahead and tried installing my own server to run a pod for the distributed open source social network, Diaspora*.
The installation went fine according to the instructions (Installing and running Diaspora) until the part where I say
bundle install --without development test
And Debian says:
Fetching source index for http://rubygems.org/
Killed
Bummer. I eventually figured out that the server simply runs out of memory. Shutting down mysqld and rerunning the command gets just a bit further:
Errno::ENOMEM: Cannot allocate memory - sudo -p 'Enter your password to install the bundled RubyGems to your system: ' mkdir -p /var/lib/gems/1.8/cache
An error occured while installing rake (0.9.2), and Bundler cannot continue.
Make sure that `gem install rake -v '0.9.2'` succeeds before bundling.
Looks like 128Mb of memory just wasn’t enough… I’ve ordered an upgrade; Let’s see if 256Mb is.
256 Mb got Diaspora running, although not without error messages in the terminal. I decided that a server capable of running Diaspora would be too expensive to run, so I joined diasp.eu instead.