Netdata kickstart.sh consumes all RAM - Server not responding

Environment

Debian 9, 2 Cores, 2 GB RAM, running some small websites and webservers

Problem/Question

Want to Update Netdata with the 1-Liner Script “bash <(curl -Ss https://my-netdata.io/kickstart.sh)”. After start, it detects the installation and “tries to Update”. Shortly after, the RAM usage goes up to 1.90 GB/2GB and the server gets slower and slower eventually not responding anymore. The idle RAM usage is around 700-800 MB of 2 GB.

What I expected to happen

Update netdata.

The script only shows this:

UPDATE:
After almost 2 hours, the script cancelled with some memory errors (could not allocate…).
I then tried the script with the parameter:
bash <(curl -Ss https://my-netdata.io/kickstart.sh) --reinstall
And for now its looks like its working properly.

No clue why that happened, maybe interesting for some other users or netdata developer.

Case closed.

It looks like you have an older version of the updater script which had a rather nasty bug causing it to repeatedly re-execute itself.

You should be able to get the newest version without running into this issue by running bash <(curl -Ss https://my-netdata.io/kickstart.sh) --reinstall. This will run like a regular install instead of an update, but will still preserve your data and configuration.

For others who might hit the same issue…
I came across something similar when running the upgrade or installer scripts (running on Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS arm64) and got a different error, hitting what looks like my cgroup limits.
The workaround from @Austin_Hemmelgarn also works for this scenario.

luis@tor1:~$ bash <(curl -Ss https://my-netdata.io/kickstart.sh)
— Found existing install of Netdata under: / —
— Attempting to update existing install instead of creating a new one —
[/home/luis]$ sudo //usr/libexec/netdata/netdata-updater.sh --not-running-from-cron
//usr/libexec/netdata/netdata-updater.sh: fork: retry: Resource temporarily unavailable
//usr/libexec/netdata/netdata-updater.sh: fork: retry: Resource temporarily unavailable
//usr/libexec/netdata/netdata-updater.sh: fork: retry: Resource temporarily unavailable
//usr/libexec/netdata/netdata-updater.sh: fork: retry: Resource temporarily unavailable
//usr/libexec/netdata/netdata-updater.sh: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
//usr/libexec/netdata/netdata-updater.sh: line 31: /netdata-updater.sh: No such file or directory
FAILED

ABORTED Failed to update existing Netdata install