All of my websites are currently running on a VPS server provided by HostIcan. I recently discovered a little quirk involving VPS servers and RubyGems.

I’ve started learning Ruby on Rails and the Ruby part uses things called ‘Gems’ in a similar way to Perl using Modules. Where you read ‘gem’, thing ‘cpan’.

I wanted to install a new gem on my server to support some Paypal integration, but ‘gem’ kept segfaulting on me.

If you’re like me, you’ll see this behaviour:

root@server [~]# gem install rubygems-update
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org
Terminated

It turns out that ‘Bulk updating…’ part gobbles up memory like it’s going spare and leads to a segfault.

The way to avoid this problem is to update RubyGems… but to do that, you need to use ‘gem’… and that leads to a segfault… and around we go again.

To break the cycle, you simply use:

gem update --system --no-update-sources

to prevent the updating of sources.

Once I’d done that, I found that I was still getting segmentation faults. Also, when I ran:

root@server [~]# gem install activemerchant --no-update-sources

I now got

 ERROR:  could not find activemerchant locally or in a repository

So the problem still wasn’t resolved!

The only solution was to force my system to the latest version of RubyGems. Unfortunately, this was not in my local repository. However, a manual update was pretty simple:

cd /tmp
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/60718/rubygems-1.3.5.tgz
tar -xvzf rubygems-1.3.5.tgz
cd rubygems-1.3
ruby setup.rb

Job done!