child pid exit signal File size limit exceeded (25)

I was investigating today an issue with a Joomla installation, were everyone (including the customer) though that this was related to the well known “white screen of death“. After a small investigation I noticed that each time when that page was accessed the global error log file of Apache (error_log) was reporting this:

[Sun Oct 31 08:43:40 2010] [notice] child pid 5984 exit signal File size limit exceeded (25)
[Sun Oct 31 08:43:40 2010] [notice] child pid 5985 exit signal File size limit exceeded (25)
[Sun Oct 31 08:43:44 2010] [notice] child pid 5998 exit signal File size limit exceeded (25)

Apache (<2.1) is not being able to server files higher then 2G and this has been fixed in versions of apache 2.1 and apache 2.2, both handle files using 64-bit file offsets. This could also be caused by anyone using an EXT2 file system, as it doesn’t support files over 2G in size.

Solution: clear all log files that reached the maximum value of 2G and restart the web server (in this case it was the error_log file):

# cp error_log error_log.old
# cat /dev/null > error_log

[How To] ImageMagick Installation

Here’s a quick how-to for installing ImageMagick ( a software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images). Use ImageMagick to translate, flip, mirror, rotate, scale, shear and transform images, adjust image colors, apply various special effects, or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses and Bézier curves.

Note: All the above steps have been performed on a CentOS 5.5 machine:

cd /root/setup/
wget ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick.tar.gz
tar xvzf ImageMagick.tar.gz
cd ImageMagick-6*
./configure –enable-shared –with-modules –without-x && make && make install

Finally, verify the ImageMagick install worked properly, by running: convert -version

# convert -version
Version: ImageMagick 6.5.9-5 2010-02-16 Q16 http://www.imagemagick.org
Copyright: Copyright (C) 1999-2010 ImageMagick Studio LLC