From previous experience, I'm pretty sure the problem is that when you compile with Go 1.1 your program's VM commit charge is much larger (~500M) than it was with Go 1.0 (~70M):

https://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=5236

Hence it runs out of memory on low-memory systems. Rebuild Go 1.1 from source with this patch applied:

https://codereview.appspot.com/download/issue9791044_36001.d...

Then rebuild your program and it should be fixed.