Error installing apt-show-versions / webmin

Pogo V4 running Debian 4.13.5, trying to install webmin which requires apt-show-versions, logged in as root:

I've read various threads elsewhere (and one here) about the same problem but the primary suggestion I've found:

apt-get -o Acquire::GzipIndexes=false update

doesn't seem to help me:

root@debian:/tmp# apt-get -o Acquire::GzipIndexes=false update
Ign:1 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stretch InRelease
Get:2 http://security.debian.org stretch/updates InRelease [63.0 kB]
Hit:3 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stretch Release
Hit:4 http://cdn-fastly.deb.debian.org/debian stretch-updates InRelease
Fetched 63.0 kB in 8s (7707 B/s)
Reading package lists... Done
root@debian:/tmp#
root@debian:/tmp#
root@debian:/tmp#
root@debian:/tmp#
root@debian:/tmp# apt-get install apt-show-versions
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  apt-show-versions
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B/34.3 kB of archives.
After this operation, 162 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Selecting previously unselected package apt-show-versions.
(Reading database ... 19287 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../apt-show-versions_0.22.7_all.deb ...
Unpacking apt-show-versions (0.22.7) ...
Setting up apt-show-versions (0.22.7) ...
** initializing cache. This may take a while **
Killed
dpkg: error processing package apt-show-versions (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 137
Processing triggers for man-db (2.7.6.1-2) ...
Errors were encountered while processing:
 apt-show-versions
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
root@debian:/tmp#

My guess would be that it's running out of memory. Since it looked like something that might be useful, I just installed it on my Dockstar running jessie. It's a slightly different version (v.0.22.4), but from the postinst script:

echo "** initializing cache. This may take a while **"
umask 0022
apt-show-versions -i

I assume your postinst script does the same thing. I'm guessing the "apt-show-versions -i" is running out of memory. Do you have a swap file setup?

Having asked that, I do have a swap file setup and I still get the "Killed" message sometimes when I run it. Using free and/or swapon -s both appear to show there is memory available while the command is running, so I'm not sure what's happening (maybe my swap file isn't really being used?), but I do see this in my dmesg output:

[2935908.100248] Out of memory: Kill process 2958 (apt-show-versio) score 102 or sacrifice child
[2935908.108955] Killed process 2958 (apt-show-versio) total-vm:155092kB, anon-rss:68976kB, file-rss:116kB, shmem-rss:0kB
[2936334.985097] kswapd0: page allocation failure: order:0, mode:0x2604050(GFP_NOFS|__GFP_COMP|__GFP_RECLAIMABLE|__GFP_NOTRACK)

Check your dmesg output for "Out of memory".

-JT

bingo!

I created a 411M swap partition on my rootfs SD card, stumbled around figuring out how to activate/enable it, but now apt-show-versions & webmin are installed without error.

Now I'll have to educate myself about swap files - in poking around I saw that bodhi prefers a swap file to a partition, and I also saw indication that the best medicine of all is running zswap...

Thank you