SQLITE_IOERR_NOMEMFATALTier 3 — Handle with care⚠️ MEDIUM confidenceI/O subsystem out of memory
Category: I/O ErrorVersions: 3.0+
🔴 Production Risk Error
Critical — I/O operations cannot complete.
What this means
SQLITE_IOERR_NOMEM (3082) is returned by the VFS layer when a memory allocation fails inside the I/O subsystem — distinct from SQLITE_NOMEM which is a core allocator failure.
Why it happens
- 1System out of memory (OOM) during VFS I/O operation.
- 2Memory limit set too low for the I/O buffer requirements.
How to reproduce
I/O operations requiring memory allocation in the VFS layer.
trigger — this will ERROR
# Same pattern as SQLITE_NOMEM — system RAM exhaustedsqlite3.OperationalError: out of memory
Fix 1
Why this works
Increase available system RAM.
Fix 2
Why this works
Reduce concurrent database connections to lower memory pressure.
Fix 3
Why this works
Stream large result sets rather than loading all rows into memory.
Sources
📚 Official docs: https://www.sqlite.org/rescode.html#ioerr_nomem
🔧 Source ref: sqlite3.h — SQLITE_IOERR_NOMEM = 3082
Confidence assessment
⚠️ MEDIUM confidence
Stable.
See also
⚙️ This error reference was generated with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy. Examples are provided to illustrate common scenarios and may not cover every case. Always test fixes in a development environment before applying to production. Spotted an error? Suggest a correction →