Python Script Terminated By Sigkill Rather Than Throwing Memoryerror

Update Again I have tried to create some simple way to reproduce this, but have not been successful. So far, I have tried various simple array allocations and manipulations, but th

Solution 1:

It sounds like you've run into the dreaded Linux OOM Killer. When the system completely runs of out of memory and the kernel absolutely needs to allocate memory, it kills a process rather than crashing the entire system.

Look in the syslog for confirmation of this. A line similar to:

kernel: [884145.344240] mysqld invoked oom-killer:

followed sometime later with:

kernel: [884145.344399] Out of memory:Killprocess3318

Should be present (in this example, it mentions mysql specifically)

You can add these lines to your /etc/sysctl.conf file to effectively disable the OOM killer:

vm.overcommit_memory = 2vm.overcommit_ratio = 100

And then reboot. Now, the original, memory hungry, process should fail to allocate memory and, hopefully, throw the proper exception.

Setting overcommit_memory means that Linux won't over commit memory, meaning memory allocations will fail if there isn't enough memory for them. See this answer for details on what effect the overcommit_ratio has: https://serverfault.com/a/510857