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docker

Container exited with code 137

Exit code 137 means the container process was killed with SIGKILL (signal 9). This is almost always caused by the Linux Out-of-Memory (OOM) killer terminating the container because it exceeded its memory limit, or by docker stop / docker kill being called.

Common causes

  • The container exceeded its memory limit and the kernel OOM killer terminated it
  • docker stop was called — this sends SIGTERM then SIGKILL after the timeout
  • Docker's --memory flag set the limit too low for what the application needs
  • A memory leak in the application caused it to grow until the kernel killed it

How to fix it

  1. Check if OOM killed it: docker inspect CONTAINER_ID | grep OOMKilled — if true, you need more memory
  2. Increase the memory limit: docker run --memory=2g myimage, or adjust in docker-compose.yml
  3. Check container resource usage: docker stats to see live memory consumption
  4. Profile the application for memory leaks if the process is growing unboundedly

Example

$ docker run --memory=256m myapp [...app output...] $ docker inspect myapp_1 | grep OOMKilled "OOMKilled": true

Container hit the 256MB memory limit and was killed by the OOM killer

Related Docker Errors

Cannot connect to Docker daemonPermission denied connecting to Docker socketDocker daemon not running on this hostImage not found or pull access deniedImage manifest not found (tag doesn't exist)

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