SIGSEV for stack growth failure: libc problem?

[Simone Benzi_1]

Hello,

Customer is facing to a problem running a batch program (not changed since last year) on a hp-ux 11.00 box.

The error is:

"Pid 5133 received a SIGSEGV for stack growth failure.
Possible causes: insufficient memory or swap space, or stack size exceeded maxssiz."

Value of maxssiz is "8388608".
Memory & swap usage is absolutely under control.

I found that this error could be generated by problems on /usr/lib/libc.2 library, libc patches currently installed are:

PHCO_18102
PHCO_18227
PHCO_18228
PHCO_18229
PHCO_19491
PHCO_20493
PHCO_22314
PHCO_23092
PHCO_23706
PHCO_24148
PHSS_16849
PHSS_19956

I know that there more recent libc patches have been released (PHCO_28425 for istances), but such update require a more consistent patch management (due to various dependencies) that customer can not face as quick as they need a solution...

Has anybody seen this problem ?

Simone

[Steven E. Protter]

Could you please post swapinfo -tam results for us to see.

You might have other kernel tuning issues that need to be dealt with.

kmtune output would be useful too.

SEP

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

I'm assuming that this is a 32-bit application; if not, then my comments apply to their 64-bit counterparts. Your maxssiz is at the defaullt (8MB) and that does tend to be on the smallish side. I would bump it up to 32MB. Maxdsiz is currently at 512MB and that is probably okay although you might increase it to 800MB or so. Even though your code has been running for this long, a kernel limit may have been reached because of growth of data which led to greater recursion. The other thing that can cause this problem (especially in 32-bit land) is that memory has become fragmewnted and no contigious chunk is large enough for the requested allocation.

[ITRC Support]

Hi,

Do you see mmap error in syslog and the Oracle log file? Something like this maybe:

/usr/lib/dld.sl: Call to mmap() failed - TEXT

/usr/lib/dld.sl: Not enough space

??

Rgds,
Tan

[Simone Benzi_1]

Hi everybody,

Thanks a lot for your answers.
Customer agreed in push up maxssiz and maxdsiz as suggested and now the batch is running fine.

Grazie!

Simone