The significant part of that error message is the "Out of memory!", the other part is probably just a side-effect of that initial error.

Your applicaton is using more memory than you have available. Given the reference to <INFILE> it seems likely that you are attempting to read a very large file, bigger than your combined physical and virtual memory into RAM. In most cases, processing large files is done sequentially and there is little benefit in loading the whole thing into RAM.

For those applications that require random access to the data, it's convenient to do so, but once you reach the point that you exhaust physical RAM, you loose most of the performance benefits through swapping anyway. At that point, creating a ram-based index to the lines of data and only loading the actual lines when required can be extremely effective alternative for seldom accessed or constantly changing flat file data.

For frequently accessed and/or infrequently changing data^*, putting it into some form of database is the way to go.

^*By this I mean where the bulk of the data doesn't change frequently.