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I have a memory intensive Python application (between hundreds of MB to several GB).
I have a couple of VERY SMALL Linux executables the main application needs to run, e.g.

child = Popen("make html", cwd = r'../../docs', stdout = PIPE, shell = True)
child.wait()

When I run these external utilities (once, at the end of the long main process run) using subprocess.Popen I sometimes get OSError: [Errno 12] Cannot allocate memory.
I don't understand why... The requested process is tiny!
The system has enough memory for many more shells.

I'm using Linux (Ubuntu 12.10, 64 bits), so I guess subprocess calls Fork.
And Fork forks my existing process, thus doubling the amount of memory consumed, and fails??
What happened to "copy on write"?

Can I spawn a new process without fork (or at least without copying memory - starting fresh)?

Related:

The difference between fork(), vfork(), exec() and clone()

fork () & memory allocation behavior

Python subprocess.Popen erroring with OSError: [Errno 12] Cannot allocate memory after period of time

Python memory allocation error using subprocess.Popen

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    Have you read this answer to the related question? Commented Mar 15, 2013 at 22:59
  • 1
    I have, thanks. There are some valuable workarounds there, some of which I may use. I was hoping for a real solution - the ability to spawn a new process from within Python that does not copy all the process memory a la fork. Commented Mar 16, 2013 at 20:27
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