Question

I have a ruby script which performs a lot of ram intensive computations. I put this in a rake task and ran it as a background process. I did a grep on the ruby process.

After a few minutes, I got this

[1]+  Killed                  ( rake sample )

Any ideas why this process got killed.

Answer 1

As you say your program is consuming a lot of memory, maybe there is none left. When there is no more memory the kernel starts to kill processes.

Try to monitor the memory usage of your process while it is running, with top or ps.

ps v PID_OF_YOUR_PROCESS

This will give you the column RSS which, is the “Real-memory (resident set) size in kilobytes of the process.” as per this link.