CentOS - May 2008 - OOM condition with file-4.17-9.0.1.el5

Hello all,

We just encountered several serious Out of Memory Problems caused by the 
file 4.17-9.0.1.EL5 utility on our mail Gateway. CentOS 5.1 kept it self 
alive by killing it parent process Amavisd-new. Manually restarting 
Amavisd-new and flushing the mail queue caused same problem. Disabling file 
for the moment, caused Amavisd-new to fail, and also defer all mail.

My quick and dirty solution was the download the Fedora Core 9's 
file.4.23-5.src.rpm. and rebuild it on CentOS 5 After upgrading file, 
restarting Amavisd-new and flushing the Postfix queue, all mail was 
delivered without problems.

Because our mail system went down, it didn't have the time to trace the 
message causing the problem.

But I want to share here that the Redhat / CentOS EL5 file utility has 
problems and provide a quick workaround for the problem.

Regards,

John
The Netherlands

On Fri, 2008-05-16 at 14:30 +0200, John wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> We just encountered several serious Out of Memory Problems caused by the 
> file 4.17-9.0.1.EL5 utility on our mail Gateway. CentOS 5.1 kept it self 
> alive by killing it parent process Amavisd-new. Manually restarting 
> Amavisd-new and flushing the mail queue caused same problem. Disabling file
> for the moment, caused Amavisd-new to fail, and also defer all mail.
> 
> My quick and dirty solution was the download the Fedora Core 9's 
> file.4.23-5.src.rpm. and rebuild it on CentOS 5 After upgrading file, 
> restarting Amavisd-new and flushing the Postfix queue, all mail was 
> delivered without problems.
> 
> Because our mail system went down, it didn't have the time to trace the
> message causing the problem.
> 
> But I want to share here that the Redhat / CentOS EL5 file utility has 
> problems and provide a quick workaround for the problem.
Can't find a bug report on this for either CentOS-5 or upstream.

Phil

On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 8:30 AM, John <jknappers-argentia at hotmail.com>
wrote:
> We just encountered several serious Out of Memory Problems caused by the
> file 4.17-9.0.1.EL5 utility on our mail Gateway. CentOS 5.1 kept it self
> alive by killing it parent process Amavisd-new. Manually restarting
> Amavisd-new and flushing the mail queue caused same problem. Disabling file
> for the moment, caused Amavisd-new to fail, and also defer all mail.
I cannot understand it. On which situations would the "file" utility
be causing OOM issues? "file" is not a daemon or something that is
running all the time. And to generate an OOM situation, you have to
exhaust all the memory on your machine.

Could you give more details here?

How much memory does the machine have?
How much swap space does the machine have?
Why do you believe "file" is the offending application?
Who is using "file" on a regular basis?
What types of files are being tested for type with the "file" utility?
Can you produce a specific file which causes "file" to allocate a lot
of memory?
Can you produce the output of "ps" or "top" which shows
"file" using a
lot of memory just before a crash?

If you don't give us such details, it's really hard to believe that
"file" is what is causing your issue. Please back your statement.

Filipe