On Sat, Jan 08, 2005 at 08:52:06PM +0000, Alex Greg wrote:
> Recently I migrated the front-end of our bulletin board (running
> phpBB, patched against the recently highlight vulnerability) to a pair
> of servers running Fedora Core 3. I compiled Apache 1.3.33 and PHP
> 4.3.10 from source.
>
> This morning, the servers slowed down to the point that they were
> almost completely unresponsive. After a while I managed to SSH into
> the machines and saw that the httpd processes had grown to 35MB each
> and were using up all the swap and RAM on the machines (they have 1GB
> RAM, 1GB swap). I then set MaxClients to 30 and restarted Apache, but
> the slowdown happened again:
[...]
> I then checked the error log and found this:
>
> *** glibc detected *** double free or corruption: 0x097ec7e8 ***
[...]
>
> This bulletin board application has been running fine for a month or
> so on a pair of Fedora Core 1 servers running PHP 4.3.9 (which I've
> recently upgraded to 4.3.10), and they didn't have the above problem.
I'd guess your software has had a problem all along which went
unnoticed with earlier versions of glibc, and that the glibc
distributed with FC3 is now detecting the problem and issuing the
diagnostic.
>From the Fedora Core 3 release notes:
glibc
The version of glibc provided with Fedora Core 3 performs
additional internal sanity checks to prevent and detect data
corruption as early as possible. By default, should corruption
be detected, a message similar to the following will be displayed
on standard error (or logged via syslog if stderr is not open):
*** glibc detected *** double free or corruption: 0x0937d008 ***
By default, the program that generated this error will also be
killed; however, this (and whether or not an error message is
generated) can be controlled via the MALLOC_CHECK_ environment
variable. The following settings are supported:
0 -- Do not generate an error message, and do not kill the program
1 -- Generate an error message, but do not kill the program
2 -- Do not generate an error message, but kill the program
3 -- Generate an error message and kill the program
Note
If MALLOC_CHECK_ is explicitly set a value other than 0, this
causes glibc to perform more tests that are more extensive than
the default, and may impact performance.
Should you have a program from a third party ISV that triggers
these corruption checks and displays a message, you should
file a defect report with the application's vendor, since this
indicates a serious bug.