Why does my geopy loop always in end in Killed: 9?

Question

I have a list of addresses and I just wind up getting a Kill 9 error when I try to add coordinates.

Is it timing out? I added sleep times to prevent it .

I get this error Killed: 9

def do_geocode(Nominatim, address):
    time.sleep(3)
    try:
        return Nominatim.geocode(address)
    except GeocoderTimedOut:
        return do_geocode(Nominatim,address)

def addCoordinates(businessList):
    businessList[0] = ["pageNum","entryNum","name","address","tagOne","tagTwo","tagThree","geoAddress","appendedLocation","latitude","longitude","key"]

    geolocator = Nominatim(timeout=None)
    z = 0
    i=1
    while i < len(businessList):
        longitude = ""
        latitude = ""
        geoLocation = ""
        geoAddress = ""
        entry = []

        appendedLocation = (businessList[i][3] + ", San Francisco")

        geoLocation = do_geocode(geolocator, appendedLocation)

        if geoLocation is not None:
            geoAddress = geoLocation.address
            latitude = geoLocation.latitude
            longitude = geoLocation.longitude

            entry = [geoAddress, appendedLocation, str(latitude), str(longitude)]
            j=0
            while j < len(entry):
                businessList[i] += [entry[j]]
                j+=1
            print("coordinates added")
            z +=1
            print(z)

        i+=1

Answer 1

Killed: 9 probably means that your Python script has been terminated by something in your OS (perhaps OOM killer?). Ensure your script doesn't occupy the whole available memory of the machine.

For geopy specifically I'd suggest to take a look at the RateLimiter class. Also note that you need to specify your unique User Agent when using Nominatim (which is explained in the Nominatim class docs). You'd get something like this:

from geopy.extra.rate_limiter import RateLimiter


def addCoordinates(businessList):
    businessList[0] = ["pageNum","entryNum","name","address","tagOne","tagTwo","tagThree","geoAddress","appendedLocation","latitude","longitude","key"]

    geolocator = Nominatim(user_agent="specify_your_app_name_here", timeout=20)
    geocode = RateLimiter(
        geolocator.geocode, 
        min_delay_seconds=3.0,
        error_wait_seconds=3.0,
        swallow_exceptions=False, 
        max_retries=10,
    )
    z = 0
    i=1
    while i < len(businessList):
        longitude = ""
        latitude = ""
        geoLocation = ""
        geoAddress = ""
        entry = []

        appendedLocation = (businessList[i][3] + ", San Francisco")

        geoLocation = geocode(appendedLocation)

        if geoLocation is not None:
            geoAddress = geoLocation.address
            latitude = geoLocation.latitude
            longitude = geoLocation.longitude

            entry = [geoAddress, appendedLocation, str(latitude), str(longitude)]
            j=0
            while j < len(entry):
                businessList[i] += [entry[j]]
                j+=1
            print("coordinates added")
            z +=1
            print(z)

        i+=1