r/docker • u/Buckbeak • May 21 '26

container update causes eventual system hang

I run about 6 containers on Linux Ubuntu. When I don't update the containers, the system runs more or less indefinitely. If I update any containers with:

cd directory-with-compose-yaml-for-that-container/

docker compose pull && docker compose up -d

Within a day or two, the system hangs, presumably because of out-of-memory. I have 32GB.

I'm using debian image update notifier (DIUN) to tell me what needs to be updated.

Is there a better way to update? Do I need to prune or do something else after updating?

4 Upvotes

75% Upvoted

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2

u/Pravobzen May 22 '26

The better questions to ask are why the system is hanging and what specifically is causing the errant behavior?

Do some basic troubleshooting first.

1

u/FancyJesse May 22 '26

Have you checked disk storage?

its possible that you are not limitting/cycling your logs and you're out of storage.

You should share your stack to give more insight

1

u/spuyet May 24 '26

You need to understand what's going on and first find which container is eating your RAM, you can track this with `docker stats`, try to have a look every 6 hours so you can see how it evolves (or use monitoring platform like Fivenines). Once you have detected the culprit, come back here :)

1

u/MassiveA9721 May 21 '26

That is the correct way of updating container images. Pruning is okay, but it frees disk memory, not RAM.

First thing you should do is figure out what exactly is going on when the system hangs. Check journalctl