When I run a playbook that simply copies a directory from one place to another, ansible throws

> 
> ERROR! A worker was found in a dead state
> 
> 
> 

Error. After some googling, it looks like this is caused by the oom-killer killing the ansible process (but i'm not exactly sure that this is the case). My Memory is:

```
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            991         372         448           1         170         467
Swap:           511         365         146

```

I don't have a clue how to fix it. I should mention I only had the RAM when I first executed the playbook, which couldn't run cause of low memory. After that, I added the swap.Not sure if it's related but note that it's a [swap file](https://www.centos.org/docs//5/html/5.1/Deployment_Guide/s2-swap-creating-file.html), not a separate partition. 

I've watched the memory while running and I see that the free swap goes down very fast once it runs that task. The error message is thrown when it hits 0.

---

I'm running the following playbook.

```
---
- hosts: localhost
  become: true
  become_method: sudo
  become_user: root

  vars:
    portals:
      - mysite
    contentPath: "/var/www/"
    backupPath: "/home/dataFiles/backups/"

  tasks:

    - name: backup content
      copy:
        src: "{{ contentPath }}/{{ item }}"
        dest: "{{backupPath}}/{{ item }}/{{ ansible_date_time.date }}/"
      with_items:
        - "{{ portals }}"
...

```

The error I've given above is the only info I get out of ansible. Even running the playbook verbosely doesn't give anything additional for that.