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When I run a playbook that simply copies a directory from one place to another, ansible throws

ERROR! A worker was found in a dead state

Error. After some googling, it looks like this is caused by the oom-killer killing the ansible process (but i'm not exactly sure that this is the case). My Memory is:

              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            991         372         448           1         170         467
Swap:           511         365         146

I don't have a clue how to fix it. I should mention I only had the RAM when I first executed the playbook, which couldn't run cause of low memory. After that, I added the swap.Not sure if it's related but note that it's a swap file, not a separate partition.

I've watched the memory while running and I see that the free swap goes down very fast once it runs that task. The error message is thrown when it hits 0.

I'm running the following playbook.

---
- hosts: localhost
  become: true
  become_method: sudo
  become_user: root

  vars:
    portals:
      - mysite
    contentPath: "/var/www/"
    backupPath: "/home/dataFiles/backups/"

  tasks:

    - name: backup content
      copy:
        src: "{{ contentPath }}/{{ item }}"
        dest: "{{backupPath}}/{{ item }}/{{ ansible_date_time.date }}/"
      with_items:
        - "{{ portals }}"
...

The error I've given above is the only info I get out of ansible. Even running the playbook verbosely doesn't give anything additional for that.

Sudh33ra
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  • Update: added 2 GB of swap. It still runs out when the command is run. – Sudh33ra Mar 16 '17 at 13:53
  • You should add the task which throws the error and the complete error message returned by Ansible. – Henrik Pingel Mar 16 '17 at 14:10
  • @HenrikPingel Thanks for the response. Added the info. – Sudh33ra Mar 17 '17 at 06:37
  • Look on your logs. Read up on [ansible debugging](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=ansible+debugging). Pfovide more information. – user9517 Mar 17 '17 at 06:56
  • Yes, you need to run your `ansible-playbook` command with `-vvv`. You should also add your ansible version with `ansible --verison` – Henrik Pingel Mar 17 '17 at 07:05
  • If there are many files under `portals` you might want to check if the [synchronize](http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/synchronize_module.html) module works better for you. Its a wrapper around rsync. – Henrik Pingel Mar 17 '17 at 07:09

2 Answers2

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There is a note in the copy_module documentation:

The “copy” module recursively copy facility does not scale to lots (>hundreds) of files. For alternative, see synchronize module, which is a wrapper around rsync.

Assuming this is the case here one should consider using the synchronize module.

Henrik Pingel
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Something like this works for me:

env no_proxy='*' ansible-playbook collect-facts.yml

You can also add export no_proxy="*" to your .bashrc or .zshrc, so you don't need to type it every time.

More detail on this : https://www.whatan00b.com/posts/debugging-a-segfault-from-ansible/

(Credit: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/32554#issuecomment-572985680)

FrankyFred
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  • Your answer could be improved with additional supporting information. Please [edit] to add further details, such as citations or documentation, so that others can confirm that your answer is correct. You can find more information on how to write good answers [in the help center](/help/how-to-answer). – Community Sep 09 '22 at 14:14