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When executing my program inside an Amazon EC2 instance (t2.small, Oregon, Ubuntu 16.04), I get the error

ElectricFence Exiting: mprotect() failed: Cannot allocate memory

The steps I follow after launching the instance are:

  1. Install build-essentials, pip and cmake

    sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install build-essential python-pip cmake

  2. Install the conan package manager

    pip install conan

  3. Clone the repository

    git clone https://github.com/oyarsa/faptp.git

  4. Cd into repo, create build folder, install dependencies and run cmake

    mkdir build && cd build conan install .. -s compiler=gcc -s compiler.libcxx=libstdc++11 --build=missing cmake .. -G "Unix Makefiles" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release cmake --build .

  5. After compilation, I go back to the root directory and try to run the program

    cd .. && ./build/bin/faptp

In doing this, the program executes for a while and then exits with this output:

SA-ILS

ElectricFence Exiting: mprotect() failed: Cannot allocate memory

The SA-ILS is output from my program. The error from ElectricFence is the problem. I've never heard of that before, and this is the first time I run this program inside EC2, so I assume it has something to do with it.

The source code is at https://github.com/oyarsa/faptp, if it helps.

itxp
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1 Answers1

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Are you sure the error isn't because, well, it can't allocate any more memory?

A t2.small instance has 2GB of RAM, and by default swap is not enabled. So if you need more than that, you're going to see that error.

There is an easy way to determine if it's a problem with the OS, or if you're actually running out of memory: stop the instance, change it to a larger instance type, and restart it. A t2.large has 8GB of RAM, and to spin one up and test it will cost you $0.094, assuming you don't leave it running for more than an error. If that works, then try a t2.medium, which will cost $0.047 to try. (Or, if wasting a dime is too expensive, you can try starting with the t2.medium)

chris
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  • I tried that, and the problem remains. This electric-fence library is a dependency of OpenSSL (which is a dependency of libcurl, which is a dependency of cpr), and although there is a way to disable it, I have no idea how to do it inside this dependency chain. I initially thought this would be because of some restriction inside AWS, but I just tested this on a VM and the result was the same. I'll remove the CPR dependency (should be trivial to do so) and try again. – itxp Dec 31 '16 at 01:22
  • Removing CPR (and thus electric-fence), it worked fine. I want to understand why I'm having these issues, though... – itxp Dec 31 '16 at 01:42