chromadb persistent client crashes when attempting to add a record to collection
08:22 07 Jul 2025

I created a persistent chromadb client and added a collection to it.

collection = client.create_collection(
    name="TEST-COLLECTION",
    embedding_function=OpenAIEmbeddingFunction(
        api_key=config.OPEN_AI_EMBEDDINGS_API_KEY,
        model_name="text-embedding-3-small"
    )
)

In a separate script, I'm trying to populate this collection with embeddings. Each document is a string representation of a JSON

client = chromadb.PersistentClient(config.CHROMADB_PATH)
collection = client.get_collection(name="TEST-COLLECTION")
doc_id = ...
doc = ...
metadate = ...
collection.add(
            ids=[doc_id],
            documents=[json.dumps(doc)],
            metadatas=[metadata]
        )

This script crashes

Process finished with exit code -1073741819 (0xC0000005)

So, what went wrong here?

This is likely something very basic that I'm overlooking, since the crash occurs right at the start.

python chromadb openaiembeddings