Question

Sometimes, when fetching data from the database either through the python shell or through a python script, the python process dies, and one single word is printed to the terminal: Killed

That’s literally all it says. It only happens with certain scripts, but it always happens for those scripts. It consistently happens with this one single query that takes a while to run, and also with a south migration that adds a bunch of rows one-by-one to the database.

My initial hunch was that a single transaction was taking too long, so I turned on autocommit for Postgres. Didn’t solve the problem.

I checked the Postgres logs, and this is the only thing in there:

2010-08-19 22:06:34 UTC LOG: could not receive data from client: Connection reset by peer

2010-08-19 22:06:34 UTC LOG: unexpected EOF on client connection

I’ve tried googling, but as you might expect, a one-word error message is tough to google for.

I’m using Django 1.2 with Postgres 8.4 on a single Ubuntu 10.4 rackspace cloud VPS, stock config for everything.

Answer 1

Only one thing I could think of that will kill automatically a process on Linux – the OOM killer. What’s in the system logs?