FreeBSD and ImageMagick crashes OS?

[Roger Olofsson]

Dear mailing list,

The other day I encountered a strange phenomena. Having run FreeBSD 
since 3.x I have never had a server crash on me until now. I completely 
blame the FreeBSD developers for spoiling me like that.

Now, when I get spoiled, it's hard to go back so when my webserver tried 
to handle a 7Mb JPG using ImageMagick and managed to crash the server I 
naturally got curious.

Turns out ImageMagick was called through php to resize the .JPG and most 
likely, the server runs out of memory/disk space. /var/tmp fills up and 
console spews as follows:

Aug 22 19:29:49 rutilus kernel: vnode_pager_putpages: I/O error 28
Aug 22 19:29:49 rutilus kernel: vnode_pager_putpages: residual I/O 32768 
at 62620
Aug 22 19:29:49 rutilus kernel: pid 29 (syncer), uid 0 inumber 49382 on 
/var: filesystem full

Server drops net and does not respond to keyboard input, not even on 
console.

Now, I realize that changing settings for ImageMagick and having a 
bigger /var disk and using a smaller .JPG of course would avoid the crash.

But, I still am somewhat "kerfuffled" about the fact that it brings my 
favourite operating system to its knees........ I'd want FreeBSD to 
intercept and log the error, the application should in my world be 
contained by the operating system and never ever be allowed to crash it. 
As the old saying was once - "an operating system should emulate 
crashes, not crash while emulating".

I know, I know, you can't stop applications from doing whatever crazy 
stuff they do and some might even crash the OS as it appears. Luckily 
there's 3 versions of the OS inbetween the crashes though ;^)

Just thought I'd share this with the list.

Greetings from Sweden
/Roger