Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 117243
application crashes at _int_malloc when short of memory
Last modified: 2016-11-24 10:15:23 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0) Description of problem: After our application runs for several days, we would get coredump with the backtrace _int_malloc from /lib/tls/libc.so.6. I checked our errorlog that indicated it "can not spawn new thread, out of memory." I am not sure if it is a bug in the glibc for memory management that causes this crash. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): glibc-2.3.2-11.9 How reproducible: Sometimes Steps to Reproduce: 1. Design a program that keep spawning threads and allocate large memory 2. run this program on linux 9 and you will run into this kind of crash. 3. Actual Results: application crashes with coredump Expected Results: backtrace the coredump file with gdb which has "_int_malloc() from /lib/tls/libc.so.6" information. Additional info:
In 99% cases this is an application bug. glibc-2.3's malloc is more sensitive to application memory management bugs than previous malloc implementation. Try some memory allocation debugger on your application first (ElectricFence, valgrind, MALLOC_CHECK_=3). BTW: if it turned out to be a glibc bug, your steps to reproduce are certainly not sufficient to do anything about it. We would need a self-contained testcase which reproduces it.
No reply in more than 5 months. Closing.