When quotas have been configured, an OpenShift cluster will enforce a limit on how much memory a build of an application can use. For hosted environments such as OpenShift Online, the default limit on the amount of memory that can be used for a build is 512Mi.

In some cases a build may require more memory than the limit. This can occur when developing using Node.JS and using npm to install packages, or when using webpack. It can also occur when using Python, and using pip to install packages with C extensions from source code rather than binary wheels, such as the numpy package.

To override the amount of memory that can be used, you can use the oc patch command to update the build configuration.

$ oc patch bc/cookbook --patch '{"spec":{"resources":{"limits":{"memory":"1Gi"}}}}'
buildconfig "cookbook" patched

When setting the memory limit for a build, the value needs to be less than the quota for terminating resources.