I hit this problem in my project which is hadoop-based:
Cannot run program "chmod": java.io.IOException: error=12, Cannot allocate memory
Did some research but found nothing useful – everybody mentioned it’s JDK’s problem not using fork()+exec() which caused excessive memory allocated during spawning new process for running shell command. However, it’s weird that I hit this problem on my AWS micro instance only, not on my MacBook, so I moved on to check some more –
It turned out swap is a problem, my micro instance in AWS does not have swap enabled (i.e. zero swap space), after add 1G swap everything’s fine now.
I’m a Java newbie, so my question is, though it got solved, did I do something properly?