Memory spike during download of today's NYT gets process killed

[nelson1379]

Calibre's attempted download of today's New York Times has consistently failed for me today in about the same place -- when the process says "9% Article downloaded: As Coal Prospects Decline, a Colorado Town Reconsiders Marijuana," the process's memory usage suddenly spikes to use almost the system's entire memory and is then killed by the kernel.

The error message says:

python2.7: unable to extent pixel cache `Cannot allocate memory' @ fatal/cache.c/CacheSignalHandler/3381.

This has happened about four times, right after downloading that article or one before or after it (consistently at 9%). Until the process reaches that point, memory usage had been normal and the process showed no signs of anything unusual.

I've been using Calibre for years and never had an issue quite like this one so it might be a one-off thing that goes away tomorrow, but I thought it was interesting enough to post. Perhaps the script is having some sort of issue with the article that comes next.

Note that I'm using Calibre 2.52 on a Raspberry Pi 2 on Arch Linux Arm. This issue might not be reproducible on an x86 or x64 system, but I thought I'd post it here anyway. Thanks.

[kovidgoyal]

Which recipe is it exactly, there are IIRC four nyt recipes. I'll need the exact title to try to reproduce.

[nelson1379]

It's the main recipe, located here: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibr...nytimes.recipe

[kovidgoyal]

I dont get a memory spike, but then I dont have an nytimes account, so my test is likely meaningless. Most likely it is caused by some article having an image that is causing ImageMagick to blow up (calibreuses imagemagick to resize images in news downloads).

[nelson1379]

No issues getting the New York Times today. Thanks.