Sometimes you see a strange fails from some programs inside your Virtual Environment. In some cases it means one of the resources controlled by OpenVZ hit the limit.
The first thing to do is to check the contents of /proc/user_beancounters file in your VE. The last column of output is fail counter. Each time a resource hit the limit, fail counter is increasing. So, if you see non-zero values in failcnt column that means something is wrong.
There are two ways to fix the situation: reconfugure (in some cases recompile) the application, or change the resource management settings.
FIXME more FIXME vzctl set VEID --parameter $((oldbarrier*1.5)):$((oldlimit*1.5)) --save