To further e-Dough's excellent response, you should expect not to execute these virtual users on the same hardware as the controller. You should expect at least three load generators to be involved, two as primary load and one as a control set. This is in addition to the controller.
Your issue does manifest as the classical, "system out of resources" condition. Consider the same best practices for monitoring your load generator health as you would in monitoring your application under test infrastructure. You want to have monitors for your classical finite resource model components ( CPU, DISK, MEMORY and NETWORK) plus additional sub components, such as a breakout of System and Application under CPU, to understand where and how your system is performing. You want to be able to eliminate false negatives on scalability where your load generators are so unhealthy that they are distorting your test results - Virtual users showing the application is slow when in fact the Virtual Users are slow because the machine in use is resource constrained.