Assertion Failure

[JINMEI Tatuya / 神明達哉]

At Wed, 14 Jan 2009 09:16:53 -0600,
Timothy Holtzen <tah at NebrWesleyan.edu> wrote:

> Last night one of our name servers stopped unexpectedly.  Looking in the
> logs I found the following messages.
> 
> Jan 13 20:15:01 foo named[29625]: statschannel.c:696: INSIST(xmlrc >= 0)
> failed
> Jan 13 20:15:01 foo named[29625]: exiting (due to assertion failure)
> 
> Anyone have any idea why this would happen or how I can keep it from
> happening again?  I notice that the failure is happening in

This assertion failure was triggered due to a failure of
xmlTextWriterEndElement().  In the current we naively assume this
library call always succeed, which is, of course, a bad practice.
We'll eventually have to update the code to catch the error and
recover from it.

On the other hand, this call should normally succeed, especially in
the way we use it.  One of few possible causes of failure I can think
of is a memory allocation failure occurring in the libxml2 library.
So, I suggest you check memory footprint of your named process.  If it
consumes much of available memory, one possible workaround is to
suppress the memory usage, e.g., by adjusting max-cache-size.

---
JINMEI, Tatuya
Internet Systems Consortium, Inc.