By default ImageMagick convert is multi threaded and will use all the available CPUs. This creates burst of CPU usage, especially when thumbnail is generated concurrently. This impacts other server activity. Any software application that uses ImageMagick, especially WordPress can experience this error when there is a limited number of resources that account utilizes in comparison to the overall server.
This error can be corrected by specifying a rule within your .htaccess file.
SetEnv MAGICK_THREAD_LIMIT 1
Adding this rule, you tell ImageMagick to run only on a single thread and this prevent the previous error.
This can also be tuned by editing the /etc/ImageMagick/policy.xml and set:
<policy domain="resource" name="thread" value="1"/>
either by adding an env variable for the user in the .bash_profile:
export MAGICK_THREAD_LIMIT=1