OOPS: Cairo has issues it can't even die: out of memory

[human]

rrdgraph chokes on some CPU graph generated by munin saying "OOPS: Cairo has issues it can't even die: out of memory"

I've drilled down to the Cairo function gfx_close_path() in rrd_graph.c:graph_paint(), starting to allocate memory to death. Eventually the 2GB limit per process is reached and the memory allocation returns error. (Tester may need "ulimit -v 2097152" to simulate 2GB cap on other OS)

Since this seems to be Cairo issue, rrdtool may not be able to do much. Perhaps should check to not feed bogus data?

The attached sample data seems to have unusual extreme spikes perhaps due to DERIVE data collection.

OS: CentOS 5.4

Other packages: cairo-1.2.4-5.el5 pango-1.14.9-6.el5.centos rrdtool-1.4.99910062100 (SVN snapshot)

[human]

sample RRD and script

[human]

rrddump of the sample RRDs

[oetiker]

well I just tried and here it works without any problem. My guess is that the solution lies in using a bit more recent versions of pango/cairo. Here I have pango 1.24.1 and cairo 1.8.6 ...

cheers tobi

[human]

I think I tracked down the issue. The error message "OOPS: Cairo has issues it can't even die: out of memory" appears in my case only when the two following conditions are true:

• imgformat is any of SVG|EPS|PDF
• rrdgraph tries to write into a file where it doesn't have write permissions

tell me if you can reproduce this behaviour

[human]

kabe#: Replying to human:

appears in my case only when the two following conditions are true:

• imgformat is any of SVG|EPS|PDF
• rrdgraph tries to write into a file where it doesn't have write permissions

Above does emit OOPS, but it seems to tickle a different bug (in Cairo?),since

• the above instantly issues OOPS, but
• the original ticket issues OOPS after eating up 2GB process limit

The ticket status seems to be still WORKSFORME. Thanks anyway for pinning it down.

[oetiker]

If the output file is not writeable you get:

OOPS: Cairo has issues it can't even die: error while writing to output stream

which seems appropriate to me ...

also if you old versions of cairo/pango on your system, there are bound to be problems with the more fancy output variants (lots got fixed there in recent times) you may want to use the rrdbuild document for guidance on how to compile the stuff yourself.

[human]

That happens ONLY with RRDtool 1.4.4 and 1.4.5 over CentOS 5.5 x86_64.

The error ONLY happens if you try to execute the command "rrdtool graph" using --imgformat SVG (or --imgformat PDF).

The important thing here is that recent linux distributions like Fedora, Ubuntu and even MacOS X (which have a more recent version of cairo library) don't experience that problem. That only happens on CentOS, at least for me and the person who opened that bug.

Any workaround ?

Upgrading pango/cairo could solve the problem ? If yes, can anyone guide me on how to do that on CentOS 5.5, without break something else ?

[oetiker]

on the rrdtool website you find instructions for compiling a current version of cairo/pango ... also, for support please use the mailinglist.