When running composer on a Cloud IDE, it gets killed

Issue

When trying to use the `composer update` or a similar command on an Acquia Cloud IDE, that command does not complete and the terminal shows a failure message "Killed".

Resolution 

1) Ensure you are using version 2 of composer, since it uses less memory than version 1. You can check the version by running "composer --version". On the Cloud IDE, composer is version 2 by Default, but you may be running the composer1 command. In this case, replace this with composer and see if that helps.

2) Try running composer by prefixing it with a COMPOSER_MEMORY_LIMIT=-1 directive, which allows composer to expand to the maximum available memory. For example: COMPOSER_MEMORY_LIMIT=-1 composer update 

3) If you've already tried the above 2 options and still get the "Killed" messages on the Cloud IDE, then sadly your project may have just become be too complex for the Cloud IDE to handle:

• Composer is known to need a lot of memory to figure out dependencies and do its job.
• The IDE memory limit is 4GB, including all the services plus the Composer or any other commands you are trying to run within it.
• You can read more about the available Cloud IDE resources here: https://docs.acquia.com/ide/resources/.

In this case, you will need to find an alternative place to execute Composer commands, for example, by using a local development environment (on a PC, Laptop, etc.) instead doing that on the IDE. You can then push the results into your Git repository, then pull down from Git back into the IDE if needed.

Cause

This happens generally for larger or more complex applications, composer needs more memory than all of the available memory in the Cloud IDE.