OOMKILLED EXIT 137

Exit code 137  ·  Back of house

OOMKilled

The exit code nobody wants and everybody gets. War stories from inside other people's production — the outages, the bad calls, the 3am saves. Numbers left in, names taken out.

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On the pass  /  Latest dispatches

  1. No. 003 · · SEV-2 · GITLAB / GITEA · 6 min on the line

    GitLab raised the rent and called it AI. So we moved 700 repos out in one weekend.

    Two engineers, ~700 repos, a Nutanix on-prem GitLab, and a Monday deadline. We left for self-hosted Gitea to dodge a renewal that doubled as a hostage note — and learned exactly how much hidden work a platform like GitLab quietly does for you.
  2. No. 002 · · SEV-1 · POSTGRES / KUBERNETES · 6 min on the line

    initdb ate two of our three Postgres replicas. The one we scaled away saved us.

    A botched rolling restart re-bootstrapped a fresh, empty database over two of three Postgres replicas. The only intact copy was a PVC Kubernetes had orphaned when we scaled down — here is how we got the data back, and why we should never have been that lucky.
  3. No. 001 · · NOTE · SRE / CULTURE · 2 min on the line

    Why this blog is called OOMKilled

    The exit code nobody wants, and what it taught me about running real systems.