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OOM killed process: what it means and how to fix it

TL;DR

The Linux OOM killer terminated a process to free memory — identify the victim, reduce memory pressure, and prevent recurrence.

Key facts

Topic
Production error triage
Stack
Linux

TL;DR

OOM killed means the kernel chose a process to terminate when RAM was exhausted. The victim is not always the leak — sometimes it is the largest innocent consumer.

Use the OOM analyser for log parsing, then tune pools and workers.