pmahoney

Orien is correct, it is the fork() system call triggered by ProcessBuilder or Runtime.exec or other means of the JVM executing an external process (e.g. another JVM running ant, a git command, etc.).

There have been some posts on the Jenkins mailing lists about this: Cannot run program "git" ... error=12, Cannot allocate memory

There is a nice description of the issue on the SCons dev list: fork()+exec() vs posix_spawn()

There is a long standing JVM bug report with solutions: Use posix_spawn, not fork, on S10 to avoid swap exhaustion. But I'm not sure if this actually made it into JDK7 as the comments suggest was the plan.

In summary, on Unix-like systems, when one process (e.g. the JVM) needs to launch another process (e.g. git) a system call is made to

pal

package com.palbrattberg.classpathtools;

import java.io.File;
import java.io.FilenameFilter;
import java.io.Serializable;
import java.net.MalformedURLException;
import java.net.URL;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Collection;
import java.util.Enumeration;