resolving java result 137

Question

I am running a java process on amazon ec2. It ran for 72 mins and then suddenly I get \"java result 137\". That is all, there are no exceptions or any other error messages.

Answer 1

Exit codes above 127 typically mean the process was stopped because of a Signal.

The exit code 137 then resolves to 128 + 9, whereas Signal 9 is SIGKILL, i.e. the process was forcefully killed. This can among others be a "kill -9 " command. However in your case this could be an out of memory condition on the operating system, which causes a functionality called "OOM Killer" to stop the process which is using up most of the memory in order to keep the OS itself stable even in such a condition.

See this question for a similar discussion.