Vim is being "killed" by OOM when trying to open prod log

I'm hvaing an odd issue that I can't see to get a handle on.

When I ssh into my prod server and I try to open /home/deploy/app/shared/log/production.log in vim or nano the process just hangs for a while and then I get a message that just says killed. when I checkout the kernal log I see that OOM killed vim. I also can't pull down the log with rsync.

I can tail the log and see everyting just fine but I can't actually open the file...

Does anyone have a good idea of where to start looking into this?

The file is almost certainly too big to fit into memory.
I'd suggest you use e.g. grep or tail or split to make it manageable.

I'm curious as to why this is happening. The server is set up the exact same way as every other server I have yet this is the only one with this issue.