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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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