Raspberry Pi Document Agent Crashes After Spawning 400 Subprocesses

According to an article published on DEV Community on November 4, 2026, a developer documented an out-of-control incident involving a document-processing agent hosted on a Raspberry Pi. The single-board computer had been running smoothly for eleven weeks when it began to degrade. Rather than crashing outright, it became extremely slow, to the point where SSH took forty seconds to produce a password prompt, and once inside the shell nothing responded to any input. The developer pulled the power at 3:14 AM.

After the reboot, the database file itself was intact, but all writes from the previous six hours were gone, and 412 rows in the queue remained stuck in a running state. In the title, the author attributes the failure to an AI agent that spun up 400 child processes and pushed the system into OOM. The article also points to broader safety concerns around long-running autonomous agents, specifically around resource management and concurrency control. As of now, this retrospective post stands as the only public record of the event, with no follow-up developments reported.