Error message "Your computer does not have enough free memory" when core dump or stacktrace failed to be created is misleading

Might this be that the core dump file size exceeded the default value as set in /etc/default/apport?

# set maximum core dump file size (default: 209715200 bytes == 200 MB)
maxsize=209715200

Looking at the code you're certainly right but the cause is that the core file is not created because of the limit set for root to 100MB in /etc/security/limits.conf

But in this case the error message is misleading.

I think there is too much speculation happening in this bug report. :)

- /etc/default/apport's maxsize value isn't used anywhere since commit 1195 (and should be removed from this config file -- this is a separate issue, bug 719564).
- /etc/security/limits.conf is only used by PAM. X running as root from /etc/init (gdm) will not end up with these rlimits applied (and, regardless, coredump limits are ignored for the /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern handler except when _not_ catching the crash (i.e. coredump writing pass-through)).

The error message given here relates strictly to size of the coredump vs available physical memory. If the coredump is larger than 3/4 of available memory, it will not attach it to the crash report, so this error message is accurate.

So, the question remains: how large is the X coredump, and how much free memory do you have?

As an example, on my system, I could catch an X crash. I have about 5GB of memory available, and X's memory footprint is about 128MB:

$ echo $(cat /proc/meminfo | egrep '^(MemFree|Cached|Writeback):' | awk '{print $2}') - + p | dc
4993428
$ grep ^VmSize /proc/$(pidof X)/status
VmSize: 128796 kB

Here is what I get on this system:

$ echo $( cat /proc/meminfo | egrep '^(MemFree|Cached|Writeback):' |awk '{print $2}') - + p | dc
1835104
$ grep ^VmSize /proc/$( pidof X)/status
VmSize: 18640 kB

Once again the crash occurred immediately after login, without any special process running other that those launched by a default Unity session.

This bug is confirmed in Ubuntu 11.04, during a LibreOffice Draw crash.

Running Oneiric I have seen several crashes like this:

'Sorry, the program "gnome-panel" closed unexpectedly Your computer does not have enough free memory to automatically analyse the problem and send a report to the developers.'

# echo $(cat /proc/meminfo | egrep '^(MemFree|Cached|Writeback):' | awk '{print $2}') - + p | dc
2807408
# grep ^VmSize /proc/$(pidof X)/status
VmSize: 193676 kB

I'm hitting this too, on a 12.04 with an OpenJDK v7 64-bit crash... attaching my _usr_lib_jvm_java-7-openjdk-amd64_jre_bin_java.1000.crash if that is of any use to you guys? If I do /usr/share/apport/apport-gtk _usr_lib_jvm_java-7-openjdk-amd64_jre_bin_java.1000.crash it shows that "Sorry, the program "java" closed unexpectedly. Your computer does not have enough free memory to automatically analyze the problem and send a report to the developers." which others also reported regularly seeing (I've just duplicated two other bugs to this one).

Is any of the above a suggested workaround or solution? Based on latest comment, ignore the maxsize in /etc/default/apport (on 12.04 certainly)... what should one put in /etc/security/limits.conf ?!

12.10 has it
apport 2.6.1-0ubuntu10

Kees Cook, just to clarify your comments in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apport/+bug/718635/comments/4 , as a potential WORKAROUND, would increasing the swap size to a large enough value, where the core dump size > (3/4) * (physical+swap) allow one to avoid this problem, or is this a hard limit on physical memory?

Screenshot of problem from Vivid.

Marking Medium as no advised WORKAROUND and reproducible in Vivid.

I got this running warzone2100 (at the very end of the campaign, BTW). I am using 4.5GB of my 7.8GB available and using 120KB of my 16GB swap file.

Xubuntu 14.04

Linux simonX64 3.13.0-46-generic #77-Ubuntu SMP Mon Mar 2 18:23:39 UTC 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

(Incidentally, I re-loaded the last saved game, finished the campaign again and there was no crash.)

I'm seeing this message ("Your computer does not have enough free memory to automatically analyze the problem and send a report to the developers") almost every time I do an update (14.04, 64bit), although I have gigabytes of free space on system partition and in RAM. Last couple of times it was caused by:
Sorry, the program "gtk-update-icon-cache-3.0" closed unexpectedly

I'm still seeing this problem trying to report a crash of gnome-shell on Ubuntu 17.10 (wayland). I even tried adding an 8GB swapfile, but it didn't help.
228K /var/crash/_usr_bin_gnome-shell.1000.crash
I'm showing 5.8G of physical RAM free, plus 15G swap.

I too have this problem. I have 9.5 GBs of SWAP