Maven compilation dies with "Killed"

I am running a Maven2 compile of a large Java project on a linux virtual machine

Compilation is failing with the following error "compiled with -X for debugging"

[DEBUG] Source roots:

[DEBUG] /home/{...}/src/main/java

[DEBUG] /home/{...}/target/generated-sourc开发者_JS百科es/meta

[INFO] Compiling 1377 source files to /home/{...}

Killed

(and I go back to bash prompt immediately)

I figure this could be:

• A linux thing (I checked that my ulimit -Hn is okay, 10000)
• A VM thing (this in on an amazon EC2 ubuntu instance)
• A maven / java thing (Never seen this kind of death, usually just out of memory errors and the like)

Any thoughts to narrow down the culprit?

My first guess would be that you're running out of memory, and the kernel is killing the compile process.

I would start by looking to see if there are other resource limits; e.g. run ulimit -a.