Using smart upgrade --stepped to upgrade a newly installed fedora 9 machine I get the error 'couldn't fork %post: Cannot allocate memory' which starts happening after installing about 60 packages and it happens in numerous packages although not all.
I broke out of that install and tried again using the --stepped option. The same error started repeating after about 30 packages. Checking in System Monitor showed that physical memory was maxing out but swap memory was not even though usage was high.
I broke out again and completed the remaining packages ( ~380) without the --stepped option. Memory usage was quite stable at around 256Mb physical (total) and 100Mb swap (total) and the same error did not repeat (it's at 220 packages and continuing)
Machine: 512Mb Ram, 512Mb swap. The first run was with selinux enforcing and the second run was with selinux permitted mode. The third run was selinux permitted mode.
There seems to be a bug in the stepped code that is leaking memory.
If you believe this is an issue with Smart, we'll need more information
pointing in that direction.
For instance, what's the actual consumption of memory for the Smart process
with and without stepped mode, for the same package set?
In your description, you're indicating that the set of packages was different,
and didn't mention memory usage for Smart, so it's hard to see what's going
on.