[CentOS] OOM condition with file-4.17-9.0.1.el5

On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 8:30 AM, John <jknappers-argentia at hotmail.com> wrote:
> We just encountered several serious Out of Memory Problems caused by the
> file 4.17-9.0.1.EL5 utility on our mail Gateway. CentOS 5.1 kept it self
> alive by killing it parent process Amavisd-new. Manually restarting
> Amavisd-new and flushing the mail queue caused same problem. Disabling file
> for the moment, caused Amavisd-new to fail, and also defer all mail.

I cannot understand it. On which situations would the "file" utility
be causing OOM issues? "file" is not a daemon or something that is
running all the time. And to generate an OOM situation, you have to
exhaust all the memory on your machine.

Could you give more details here?

How much memory does the machine have?
How much swap space does the machine have?
Why do you believe "file" is the offending application?
Who is using "file" on a regular basis?
What types of files are being tested for type with the "file" utility?
Can you produce a specific file which causes "file" to allocate a lot of memory?
Can you produce the output of "ps" or "top" which shows "file" using a
lot of memory just before a crash?

If you don't give us such details, it's really hard to believe that
"file" is what is causing your issue. Please back your statement.

Filipe