Hi all,

I'm spawning a java process from inside a perl script using system() function call.

Intermittently, this JVM process gets killed abruptly without any exception trace and the exit code I get is 143 .. I don't know who is killing the process.

I suspected oom-killer from Linux which kills selected processes for killing to recover more memory. But I'm not sure this is the reason because:

1) I don't see any related messages in /var/log/messages
2) Considering the badness algorithm the oom-killer uses to identify process to kill, I don't think my process is a good candidate because my process does heavy I/O and doesn't have any child processes. It does consume reasonably large amount of memory, but there are other JVM processes which when run on the same box consume even more memory. I'm currently running the JVM with -Xms256M and -Xmx512M options. I tried changing these options to -Xmx32M and the problem persists even then.
3) If there were a memory scarcity, then I thought JVM will first exit by throwing OutOfMemoryError exception. I don't see any exception at all. The process just exits.

Does anybody have any idea what could be the reason why this could happen?

Thanks,
Venkat.