Cannot update n8n successfully

[britaliano]

Hello!

I am running n8n on a Raspberry Pi Zero w 2 with Raspbian Lite.

n8n is running inside pm2.

I am really happy with my setup but every time I have tried to update, using

npm update -g n8n

The update fails to complete, or at least the ssh windows does not respond and I cnanot start another ssh session.

I have to leave it for a few hours (during which the disk activity light seems to flash and then flicker constantly) and then pull the plug.

Starting up again, I cannot load n8n in the browser. According to

pm2 status n8n

n8n is running but at 100% or even 200% CPU.

If I uninstall n8n and try to install again, that installation never completes.

So I have to restore a clone of my SD card each time I try to update n8n!

Seems I will be stuck on my current version.

It feels like an issue specific to my environment but can anyone offer any insight?

[MutedJam]

Presumably you have already stopped n8n using pm2 stop n8n before running npm install -g n8n@latest?

Are you by any chance doing anything else on your Raspi that might drive up CPU usage to unsustainable levels here? I am asking because I am running n8n with a very low CPU load (besides several other services consuming a lot more CPU power), though I am using a Pi 4 rather than a Pi Zero.

Another thing you might want to try would be to check whether your database might be the culprit here. If you are using a rather old version of n8n with SQLite, you might need to manually delete data as described in this thread (since a bug would have prevented automatic deletion of old executions from working as expected):

VACUUM does nothing for the file size of database.sqlite?

I have just had a similar problem and managed to resolve it. Doing the above commands and a vacuum still did not reduce the size of the database for some reason. I therefore tried the following: DELETE FROM execution_entity; VACUUM; This reduced my database.sqlite from 16gb to 108kb! It feels like a nuclear option but all appears to be working.

[britaliano]

I forgot to add that step in my note, but I did stop pm2 first.

It’s a brand new Zero 2 W and the processor does not stumble while n8n is running normally, just when/after I try to update.

My version is 0.152.0, so I am almost right up to date. This was the version I installed when I made a clean install last week.

[MutedJam]

Hm, that’s odd. I suppose the machine might struggle with the npm install command seeing it has very limited resources, but unfortunately I don’t have it here so can’t test this first hand.

Would you be able to run npm in verbose mode (npm install -g n8n@latest -dd) to get an idea of what happens before it dies for you?