Hi my design is stuck at detail routing, the tool cosumes 14GB of memory and crash :

[INFO DRT-0194] Start detail routing.
[INFO DRT-0195] Start 0th optimization iteration.
    Completing 10% with 0 violations.
    elapsed time = 00:00:11, memory = 8888.41 (MB).
    Completing 20% with 0 violations.
    elapsed time = 00:00:58, memory = 14902.81 (MB).
[ERROR]: during executing openroad script /openlane/scripts/openroad/droute.tcl
[ERROR]: Exit code: 1
[ERROR]: Last 10 lines:
child killed: kill signal

I'm trying to look for errors in the log files but none of them mentions the reason for the error. could you please let me know any suggestions to work around the issue? I've already increased the area but looks like it doesn't help.

It seems that you ran out of memory. Decrease the area or increase your RAM (you can also add swap)

Does openlane have documented how is the relation between instance count and memory footprint? this design only has 7297 cells, my computer has 16GB of memory.

I do not know such a documentation but detail routing can consume a lot

I will try to go for a hierarchical flow, and harden macros of sub-blocks

Do you have any swap space? If you can package a test case as an issue we can see on a bigger machine how much memory is required. 7k cells is pretty small

Sure I can send you the testcase, I'll try to create the issue on the openlane github. about the cell count, I got the "7k" from the final_summary_report generated on: openlane/aes/runs/aes/reports/final_summary_report.csv is that the right report to look at cell count?

Things to check: Make sure basic placement is disabled