church of emacs wrote:

Hi, (I fixed this problem, I'm posting it nevertheless because it might be interesting to others)

I updated MediaWiki from 1.15.5 to 1.17alpha and got an interesting error: thumbnails could not be generated anymore; there was an empty error message (via thumb.php:147). I traced it back to the ImageMagick call made by MediaWiki, see http://pastebin.ca/2047146.

Two notable facts: a) MediaWiki didn't return ulimit's error and instead displayed a generic error. This should not be the case.

b) I have mostly default settings and enough RAM (>1gb on machine, 512MB set in php.ini). This *should* work with default settings.

It turned out that the default setting of $wgMaxShellMemory = 102400; was too low. Increasing it by *10 fixed all problems. Is the default setting perhaps too low? Anyone else experience this problem?

Also: Were there any major changes on how images are handled between 1.15 and 1.17? Previously thumbnails worked just fine.

Regards, Tobias / User:Church of emacs

Interesting. The out-of-memory affected bash, not convert. Did the filename contain wildcard characters?