How to solve "java.io.IOException: error=12, Cannot allocate memory" calling Runtime#exec()?

Question

On my system I can't run a simple Java application that start a process. I don't know how to solve.

Could you give me some hints how to solve?

The program is:

[root@newton sisma-acquirer]# cat prova.java
import java.io.IOException;

public class prova {

   public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
        Runtime.getRuntime().exec("ls");
    }

}

The result is:

[root@newton sisma-acquirer]# javac prova.java && java -cp . prova
Exception in thread "main" java.io.IOException: Cannot run program "ls": java.io.IOException: error=12, Cannot allocate memory
        at java.lang.ProcessBuilder.start(ProcessBuilder.java:474)
        at java.lang.Runtime.exec(Runtime.java:610)
        at java.lang.Runtime.exec(Runtime.java:448)
        at java.lang.Runtime.exec(Runtime.java:345)
        at prova.main(prova.java:6)
Caused by: java.io.IOException: java.io.IOException: error=12, Cannot allocate memory
        at java.lang.UNIXProcess.<init>(UNIXProcess.java:164)
        at java.lang.ProcessImpl.start(ProcessImpl.java:81)
        at java.lang.ProcessBuilder.start(ProcessBuilder.java:467)
        ... 4 more

Configuration of the system:

[root@newton sisma-acquirer]# java -version
java version "1.6.0_0"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.5) (fedora-18.b16.fc10-i386)
OpenJDK Client VM (build 14.0-b15, mixed mode)
[root@newton sisma-acquirer]# cat /etc/fedora-release
Fedora release 10 (Cambridge)

EDIT: Solution This solves my problem, I don't know exactly why:

echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory

Up-votes for who is able to explain :)

Additional informations, top output:

top - 13:35:38 up 40 min,  2 users,  load average: 0.43, 0.19, 0.12
Tasks: 129 total,   1 running, 128 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  1.5%us,  0.5%sy,  0.0%ni, 94.8%id,  3.2%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   1033456k total,   587672k used,   445784k free,    51672k buffers
Swap:  2031608k total,        0k used,  2031608k free,   188108k cached

Additional informations, free output:

[root@newton sisma-acquirer]# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       1033456     588548     444908          0      51704     188292
-/+ buffers/cache:     348552     684904
Swap:      2031608          0    2031608

Answer 1

This is the solution but you have to set:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory

Answer 2

What's the memory profile of your machine ? e.g. if you run top, how much free memory do you have ?

I suspect UnixProcess performs a fork() and it's simply not getting enough memory from the OS (if memory serves, it'll fork() to duplicate the process and then exec() to run the ls in the new memory process, and it's not getting as far as that)

EDIT: Re. your overcommit solution, it permits overcommitting of system memory, possibly allowing processes to allocate (but not use) more memory than is actually available. So I guess that the fork() duplicates the Java process memory as discussed in the comments below. Of course you don't use the memory since the 'ls' replaces the duplicate Java process.