Managing Dgraph core dump files on Linux

It is recommended to use the ulimit -c unlimited setting for the Dgraph process core dump files. Non-limited core files contain all Dgraph data that is resident in memory (RSS of the Dgraph process).

Since large applications powered by the Oracle Endeca Server may take up the entire amount of available RAM, the core dump files can also grow large and take up the space equal to the size of the physical RAM on disk plus the size of the server data files in memory.

Provision enough disk space to accommodate core files based on this estimate:

Note: If you are not setting ulimit -c unlimited, you could be seeing the Dgraph process crashes that do not write any core files to disk, since on some Linux installations the default for ulimit -c is set to 0.

Alternatively, it is possible to limit the size of core files with the ulimit -c <size> command, although this is not recommended. If you set the limit size in this way, the core files cannot be used for debugging, although their presence will confirm that the Dgraph had crashed. To be able to troubleshoot the crash, change this setting to ulimit -c unlimited, and reproduce the crash while capturing the entire core file. Similarly, to enable Endeca Support to troubleshoot the crash, you will need to reproduce the crash while capturing the full core file.