Python subprocess.Popen erroring with OSError: [Errno 12] Cannot allocate memory after period of time

Question

Note: This question has been re-asked with a summary of all debugging attempts here.

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I have a Python script that is running as a background pr

Answer 1

I don't think that the circumstances given in the Zenoss article you linked to is the only cause of this message, so it's not clear yet that swap space is definitely the problem. I would advise logging some more information even around successful calls, so that you can see the state of free memory every time just before you do the ps call.

One more thing - if you specify shell=True in the Popen call, do you see different behaviour?

Update: If not memory, the next possible culprit is indeed file handles. I would advise running the failing command under strace to see exactly which system calls are failing.