I can't comment on the accepted answer, due to low reputation. However, I would like to add, this behavior is by design. The NodeManager is killing your container. It sounds like you are trying to use hadoop streaming which is running as a child process of the map-reduce task. The NodeManager monitors the entire process tree of the task and if it eats up more memory than the maximum set in mapreduce.map.memory.mb or mapreduce.reduce.memory.mb respectively, we would expect the Nodemanager to kill the task, otherwise your task is stealing memory belonging to other containers, which you don't want.