Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 53702
top, ps segmentation fault
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:37:09 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90) Description of problem: Seems, when number of running processes exceeds some magic number, top, ps and other process monitoring programs crashes with segmentation fault. I can imagine, that it could be some kernel max value problem, but I could not found which one. Just reboot can help the system... to be managable again. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. log in 500+ users. 2. start few bg processes for each user. 3. if number of running processes are more than 2000-3000 start top. Actual Results: Craches with "Segmentation fault" message. Expected Results: It should work, because system is without any controll without. Additional info: Linux gate.polarhome.com 2.4.3-12 #1 Fri Jun 8 15:05:56 EDT 2001 i686 procps-2.0.7-8
I am also seeing this on some 7.1 servers I'm running oracle on. I don't think the number of processes has to be concurrent either, as all three oracle servers I administrate (all 7.1) are or have exhibited this behavior (two of them currently) and the number of running processes is around 200. I have a top core dump I can send if that would be useful. It's about 340k. Jason
There is a large chance this has been fixed since 2.0.7. If you can repeat this, could you please try out the latest version http://www.surriel.com/procps/procps-2.0.11.tar.bz2 If it still crashes, can you run it in gdb and get a backtrace when it crashes.
Ok I took your tarball and made an RPM out of it using the 2.0.7-8 SRPM (I dropped all patches and commented out the X stuff). I doubt you want it but if you do I can attach the SRPM or email it to you. Upgrading to that does indeed fix the problem. Any chance this could make an official errata for 7.1 and later? Jason
Rawhide already has a 2.0.11 based procps, but that one won't work on 7.x without a rebuild, so I don't need the srpm. We don't typically do bugfix errata for old versions like 7.1. Sorry.
If I use the SRPM from rawhide but comment out the NPTL patch, it should work fine on 7.1 correct (i.e. there's nothing different in the tarball you sent and the one used in (S)RPM)? Jason
Even the NPTL patch shouldn't affect things. Its meant to be backwards compatible. But yeah, the tarball is the same.