syslog-ng bug

Today I stumpled upon a syslog-ng bug.

We are using syslog-ng-2.1.3 on one of our machines which sends part of his messages over UDP to 2 syslog machines. On some days we noticed that syslog-ng and some other services are stopped. Restarting syslog-ng showed us that they were killed by the OOM-killer.
I directly suspected the java process that was also running on that machine.

After googling around I found this syslog-ng bug: https://bugzilla.balabit.com/show_bug.cgi?id=39

And indeed, we had the same problem. This is how I could reproduce it:

  • Stop the syslog service (on the host which receives the messages)
  • Restart syslog-ng
  • Watch the memory usage of syslog-ng growing until it starts swapping and triggers the OOM-killer

Luckily this bug is already solved, and by upgrading to syslog-ng-2.1.4 the problem is fixed.

CentOS doesn’t provide the rpm packages of syslog-ng, silfreed.net does: http://www.silfreed.net/download/repo/

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 19th, 2009 at 13:49 and is filed under Linux SysAdmin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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