A jest worker process was terminated by another process

Question

I am getting following error when I am building my application.

Test suite failed to run

  A jest worker process (pid=2439) was terminated by another process: signal=SIGKILL, exitCode=null. Operating system logs may contain more information on why this occurred.
    at ChildProcessWorker._onExit (node_modules/jest-worker/build/workers/ChildProcessWorker.js:366:23)

Can you please advice how to check OS logs on linux system and how to resolve this issue?

Neuromuscular

I'm getting this error in my Jenkins pipeline and not in local. Does anyone know what is the root cause for this issue? – Asthma

Answer 1

A temporary workaround is running jest with these two arguments, --runInBand --no-cache, to run all tests in serial (slower) and to use a clean cache every time (also slower). But at least the tests run. 😬

FYI, I'm using NODE_OPTIONS=--experimental-vm-modules to use ESM modules with ts-jest. Not sure if that causes the instability.

Havelock

` --runInBand` solves the issue, no need for --no-cache, also --experimental-vm-modules is not needed unless u need to work with ESM – Semple

Answer 2

Should be resolved by https://github.com/jestjs/jest/pull/14015 Please update version of jest to latest and issue should be resolved.

Update: If not working we found a workaround of adding and extra jest worker. Refer to documentation: https://jestjs.io/docs/configuration#maxworkers-number--string

Michamichael

Sadly, it doesn't solve the problem for us. Even with Jest 29.6.1 (the "fix" has been released in 29.6.0) – Leucas

Apologies. We resolved the issue by adding an extra worker. – Michamichael

This is a workaround in the jest configuration file jestjs.io/docs/configuration#maxworkers-number--string – Michamichael

I don't see any difference. I set maxWorkers to 50% because that's the trial and error best value I could find to optimize for speed, but I still get many SIGKILL errors when the machine is under stress, which happens whenever I open more than one VSCode window. My script is "test": "NODE_NO_WARNINGS=1 node node_modules/.bin/jest --no-cache --bail". My machine is i5 with 16GB RAM. Jest is 29.7.0 – Autograft

Answer 3

I was getting this issue because I forgot to switch to the correct Node version for my project before running jest 😅, e.g. nvm use 18.

Jimenez