Pid XXXXX received a SIGSEGV for stack growth failure

[Dale White]

OS Version: (uname -srvm)
HP-UX B.11.11 U 9000/800

I am experiencing a problem when trying to boot a suite of Tuxedo based applications on our hpux box. The smaller applications boot normally, however the largest applications seem to hang for twenty or thirty minutes and then issue the following message:
Pid XXXXX received a SIGSEGV for stack growth failure.
Possible causes: insufficient memory or swap space,
or stack size exceeded maxssiz.
Where XXXXX is the pid of the application.

I don't think that this is an issue with memory/swap space. When I do a swapinfo on the box it looks like plenty of space is available. Here is the output from swapinfo:
#
# /usr/sbin/swapinfo -a
Kb Kb Kb PCT
TYPE AVAIL USED FREE USED
dev 4194304 0 4194304 0%
reserve - 216368 -216368
memory 3230676 2174924 1055752 67%

I also tried increasing the maxssiz, maxdsiz, and maxtsiz. Their current values are:
maxssiz 203886080
maxtsiz 67108864
maxdsiz 2684354560


I am fairly new to hpux so I somewhat randomly decided on the values that these should be increased to (which may be part of the problem). Even after making these values very large, I am still getting this error.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

First of all, maxdsiz, maxssiz, and maxtsiz have 64-bit equivalent settings in addition
to the 32-bit vaues you listed. If you are running 64-bit 11.11 and your application are 64-bit then you must bump up the 64bit versions as well. Your error generally means that maxssiz is too small but anything above 128M (and that is generous is probably not needed). A setting of about 256M is very generous for maxtsiz but maxdsiz is difficult to know without knowing more about your application. You probably need to look at swapinfo and the process size with ps or glance as the problems are ongoing to get a better handle on what the real problem is.

[Sukant Naik]

Hi Dale,

Looks like you have got 64 bit HP-UX installed. So you need to change the maxtsiz_64bit and the maxssiz_64bit kernel parameter.

-Sukant

[Dale White]

I increased the _64bit parameters corresponding to maxdsiz, maxssiz, and maxtsiz at the same time that I increased their 32 bit equivalents, however, this seems to have no effect.
Are there any tools for determining the how much of each of these system resources, that my program is using?
Thanks.

[Wodisch]

Hi,

there are some (hidden) rules about the sizes of MAXDSIZ and MAXSSIZ (only for the 32bit ones - the limits for the 64bit ones are so vast that you will not reach them this year):

MAXDSIZ + MAXSSIZ + *something* < 1GB

MAXSSIZ <= 79MB

In the past kernels did not even boot when violating these rules, but today they usually still do, but ignore the *broken* setting...

Just my $0.02,
Wodisch

[Olav Baadsvik · Accepted solution]

Hi,

If the applications you try to run are
compiled/linked on hp-ux 10.20, the following
may be an explanation to your problems:

10.20 binary running on HPUX 11.00 only works if stack set to
80 Mb or less.

HPUX 10.20 does not support stacks larger than 80 Mb. The 10.20 ABI
does not allow stack sizes larger than 80Mbytes. Running the 10.20
application on 11.x with a stack size larger than 80Mbytes fails.
That is the expected behavior.
For the program to run, either set the stack
size to 80 MB or less or recompile the
program on hp-ux 11.xx

Regards
Olav