OOM
Out of Memory
A failure condition in which a process or system cannot obtain enough memory to continue safely.
Plain English
The application ran out of available memory.
In context
OOM failures can result from leaks unbounded workloads oversized allocations or limits imposed by an operating system container or runtime.
Example
“The worker was restarted after an OOM while processing an unusually large export.”
When you'll hear this
- incident response
- performance debugging
- capacity planning
Common misunderstanding
An OOM does not always mean the machine has no physical memory; a configured limit may have been reached.
Also known as
out of memorymemory exhaustion
Commonly used by
Related terms
Updated: 2026-08-27
