Syndrom: FATAL ERROR: CALL_AND_RETRY_LAST Allocation failed - process out of memory

When?

Doing an npm search whatever, npm tries to make indexing works.

It returns the “syndrom” message and as I’m using NVM a path like below referencing how npm has been called.

...
argv "/home/myuser/.nvm/versions/node/v6.2.2/bin/node" "/home/myuser/.nvm/versions/node/v6.2.2/bin/npm"
...

A solution

The solution for me was taking "/home/myuser/.nvm/versions/node/v6.2.2/bin/node" "/home/myuser/.nvm/versions/node/v6.2.2/bin/npm" and then upgrade the call with node additional options like below:

"/home/myuser/.nvm/versions/node/v6.2.2/bin/node" --max_old_space_size=4096 --optimize_for_size --max_executable_size=4096 --stack_size=4096 "/home/myuser/.nvm/versions/node/v6.2.2/bin/npm" search whatever

As my configuration is 8GB of RAM on an Ubuntu x64, you may change value 4096