[CentOS] General CentOS 5.1 (or Gnome) instability?

Thu Jun 12 15:46:58 UTC 2008
Alfred von Campe <alfred at von-campe.com>

On Jun 5, 2008, at 10:23, Johnny Hughes wrote:

> I would initially start out but looking at any 3rd party installed  
> products.

One of our third party applications (SlickEdit) has been having its  
share of issues.  We finally had an error message (Xlib: resource ID  
allocation space exhausted) that produced an interesting Google hit:

   http://fixunix.com/xwindows/351264-core-xlib-xid-allocator.html

Here is some of the relevant information from that page:

   The problem is that right now if you don't use the Display internals,
   and override the XID allocator associated with each Display  
structure,
   the code eventually hits this in libX11 (_XAllocID()):

     if (id != 0x10000000) {
         (void) fprintf(stderr, "Xlib: resource ID allocation space  
exhausted!\n");
         id = 0x10000000;
         dpy->resource_id = id >> dpy->resource_shift;
     }

   So, if you have an application running for weeks or months that
   allocates XIDs over a period of time, for GCs, Pixmaps, etc.
   you will eventually hit that, unless you carefully replace the core
   allocator for each Display, and reuse ids.

I can't vouch for the accuracy of that information, but it does seem  
plausible and applicable to my situation.  And it appears that this  
issue did not exist in CentOS 4, or at least I did not see it until I  
upgraded to CentOS 5.1.

Alfred