Rust: Investigating an Out of Memory Error

The analysis looks rather half-finished. They did not analyze why so much memory was consumed. If this is the cache which persists after the first call, if it&#x27;s temporary working memory, or if it&#x27;s an accumulating memory leak. And why it uses so much memory at all.<p>I couldn&#x27;t find any other complaints about rust backtrace printing consuming a lot of memory, which I would have expected if this was normal behaviour. So I wonder if there is anything special about their environment or usecase?<p>I would assume that the same OOM problem would arise when printing a panic backtrace. Either their instance has enough memory to print backtraces, or it doesn&#x27;t. So I don&#x27;t understand why they only disable lib backtraces.

In the article they talk about how printing an error from the anyhow crate in debug format creates a full backtrace, which leads to an OOM error. This happens even with 4 GB of memory.<p>Why does creating a backtrace need such a large amount of memory? Is there a memory leak involved as well?

Can&#x27;t they print something that llvm-symbolizer would pick up offline?

I once had a faulty python based ai image generator running on my machine that used all 64 gigs of ram and oomed with a memory dump written to fs. This is no fun when that happens. But mostly these kind of bugs are misconfigurations or bad code, never ending while loops, whatever.

Ahh, I did this in Python before I learned about Cursor and Sourceforge‘s Cody. I‘d use a template where I provide a tree of my project structure, and then put code file contents in my template file, and then have a full repo in one giant markdown file. This only worked for smaller projects, but it worked damn well to provide the full context to an LLM to then ask questions about my code :)

It&#x27;s kind of shocking that debug-formatting a backtrace allocates enough memory to OOM the process, though. What&#x27;s going on there?

Reminds me a bit of a post my colleague wrote a while back: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.svix.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;heap-fragmentation-in-rust-applications&#x2F;">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.svix.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;heap-fragmentation-in-rust-applica...</a>

great one! and i would recommnd this hands-on guide for diagnosing memory leaks in Rust applications. it explains how to enable heap profiling in &#x27;jemalloc&#x27;, collect memory allocation data, and generate flame graphs for analysis. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;greptime.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;2024-01-18-memory-leak#diagnosing-memory-leaks-with-flame-graphs-and-jemalloc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;greptime.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;2024-01-18-memory-leak#diagnosing...</a>