Bug 1050154

The way we are collecting information about a crash can cause the system to hang by consuming too many resources.

There are a number of problems here.

1. The process consumes too much CPU
2. The process consumes too much memory and frequently causes the system to swap
3. The process takes far too long and the user is notified many minutes after the problem occurred. This is not acceptable for user visible crashes.
4. In some cases the entire system becomes unresponsive due to swapping and the system is likely to be powered off and data loss may occur.

Top output:
29205 root      20   0  857448   1652   1316 R  14.9  0.0   0:31.32 journalctl                                                                     
   61 root      20   0       0      0      0 D  10.6  0.0   1:57.78 kswapd0               

PS output:
ps -eaf|grep 29204
root     29204 29143  0 13:06 ?        00:00:00 /bin/sh -c if grep '^TracerPid:[[:space:]]*[123456789]' proc_pid_status >/dev/null 2>&1; then             # We see 'TracerPid: <nonzero>" in /proc/PID/status             # Process is ptraced (gdb, strace, ltrace)             # Debuggers have wide variety of bugs where they leak SIGTRAP             # to traced process and nuke it. Ignore this crash.             echo "The crashed process was ptraced - not saving the crash"             exit 1  # abrt will remove the problem directory         fi         if grep -q ^ABRT_IGNORE_ALL=1 environ \         || grep -q ^ABRT_IGNORE_CCPP=1 environ \         ; then             echo "ABRT_IGNORE variable is 1 - not saving the crash"             # abrtd will delete the problem directory when we exit nonzero:             exit 1         fi         # Try generating backtrace, if it fails we can still use         # the hash generated by abrt-action-analyze-c         ##satyr migration:         #satyr abrt-create-core-stacktrace "$DUMP_DIR"         abrt-action-generate-core-backtrace         # Run GDB plugin to see if crash looks exploitable         abrt-action-analyze-vulnerability         # Generate hash         abrt-action-analyze-c &&         abrt-action-list-dsos -m maps -o dso_list &&         (             # Try to save relevant log lines.             # Can't do it as analyzer step, non-root can't read log.             executable=`cat executable` &&             base_executable=${executable##*/} &&             # Test if the current version of journalctl has --system switch             journalctl --system -n1 >/dev/null             if [ $? -ne 0 ];             then                 # It's not an error if /var/log/messages isn't readable:                 test -f /var/log/messages || exit 0                 test -r /var/log/messages || exit 0                 log=`grep -F -e "$base_executable" /var/log/messages | tail -99`             else                 uid=`cat uid` &&                 log="[System Logs]:\n" &&                 log=$log`journalctl -b --system | grep -F -e "$base_executable" | tail -99` &&                 log=$log"\n[User Logs]:\n" &&                 log=$log`journalctl _UID="$uid" -b | grep -F -e "$base_executable" | tail -99` &&                 log=`echo -e "$log"`             fi             if test -n "$log"; then                 printf "%s\n" "$log" >var_log_messages                 # echo "Element 'var_log_messages' saved"             fi         )
root     29205 29204 18 13:06 ?        00:00:44 journalctl _UID=0 -b
root     29206 29204  0 13:06 ?        00:00:00 grep -F -e plymouth
root     29207 29204  0 13:06 ?        00:00:00 tail -99