Ongoing 'Cannot allocate memory' and 'Bad request line' error messages from 1.3.9 server

[John A. Murdie]

We're continuing to see:

E [dd/mmm/yyyy:hh:mm:ss +0000] Unable to fork /usr/lib/cups/cgi-bin/printers.cgi - Cannot allocate memory.

messages in our 1.3.9 cupsd error_log file. When this happens, service becomes very glitchy (lots of '404 Not Found' messages from the web interface) and the server has to be restarted - about once a week. A memory leak, I presume.

We also see lots of:

E [dd/mmm/yyyy:hh:mm:ss +0000] Bad request line "^W^C^A" from A.B.C.D!

messages. It doesn't seem to break anything, but I'd like to know what causes these. Our Linux clients have CUPS 1.3.9 also.

None of the 1.3.9 bug reports seem to address these problems. We built the server with the configure options:

./configure --prefix=/usr/ --localstatedir=somewhere --sysconf=somewhere/etc --enable-gssapi --enable-ssl --disable-cdsassl --disable-gnutls --enable-openssl

We have version 0.9.8h of OpenSSL, just in case that is relevant to the cause of the second type of error message reported above.

John A. Murdie