pip installation of gensim - 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 53

Question

I am trying to install gensim using pip on my Virtual Machine. However, I get the error :

Command /usr/bin/python -c "import setuptools, tokenize;__file__='/tmp/pip_build_root/scipy/setup.py';exec(compile(getattr(tokenize, 'open', open)(__file__).read().replace('\r\n', '\n'), __file__, 'exec'))" install --record /tmp/pip-jM6uSL-record/install-record.txt --single-version-externally-managed --compile failed with error code 1 in /tmp/pip_build_root/scipy
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/pip", line 11, in <module>
    sys.exit(main())
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip/__init__.py", line 185, in main
    return command.main(cmd_args)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip/basecommand.py", line 161, in main
    text = '\n'.join(complete_log)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 53: ordinal not in range(128)

I did look for similar issues on SO, and found `pip install pandas` gives UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 41: ordinal not in range(128) to be the closest one. However, I did try updating pip to the latest version.

The pip version details

pip 1.5.6 from /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages (python 2.7)

Any thoughts for this?

Answer 1

I resolved it, turns out it was a memory issue. Here's a nice tutorial about swap memory that can be useful - https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-add-swap-on-ubuntu-14-04