nGinx keeps shutting down

The nginx process keeps shutting itself off, here are the errors

2023/04/18 11:47:29 [alert] 11073#0: worker process 11312 exited on signal 9
2023/04/18 11:47:29 [alert] 11073#0: fork() failed while spawning "worker process" (12: Cannot allocate memory)
2023/04/18 11:47:29 [alert] 11073#0: could not respawn worker process

I know it has enough ram, it's a VPS I control and I've jacked its ram up to 4GB and still same thing. It's a very lightweight nginx server, no PHP, simple image serving. Running nginx 1.0.15, I know it's old, but it worked for many years no issues. Nothing's changed on this VPS in years.

Add swap. Also, make sure the're isn't any credentials/privileges problem.

Also, reffering to this question where some app was limited with the RAM it could use. What does these workers do? This might be your answer.

Also, have you tried to update everything?

fork() failed while spawning "worker process" (12: Cannot allocate memory) Is the clue.

If you look at man 2 fork you can find out what conditions lead to that position.

ENOMEM fork() failed to allocate the necessary kernel structures because memory is tight.

ENOMEM An attempt was made to create a child process in a PID namespace whose "init" process has terminated. See pid_namespaces(7).

Its should be one of these two conditions. Does the entire VPS around the same time get restarted? If so there is your answer.

You can potentially test this if you cant tell by doing ps -o lstart 1 in the container and checking when the init process was started.

Else, if you still get this when it says 'memory is tight' it might be because overall system memory is tight. Thats not something you may be privvy to in your container, so you'd need to request more information from the hosting provider.

Based on the error message you provided, it seems that the worker process is exiting due to a signal 9, which indicates a SIGKILL signal. Additionally, the error message suggests that the fork() system call is failing, which means that the process is unable to create a new child process.

The error message "Cannot allocate memory" suggests that the system may be running out of memory, which could be causing the fork() system call to fail. One possible solution to this issue is to increase the amount of memory available to the system.

You can try to check the available memory on your server using the "free -tm" command, which will display information about the available memory and swap space. If the system is running low on memory, you may need to add more memory to your server or adjust your nginx configuration to use less memory.

Another possible solution is to reduce the number of worker processes in your nginx configuration. You can do this by adjusting the "worker_processes" setting in your nginx.conf file. By reducing the number of worker processes, you can decrease the memory usage of your nginx server.