darktable-cli crashes on certain photos

Processing
#1

Hi,
I am using darktable-cli to export an image to png. The command looks like that:

darktable-cli DSC_6164.NEF DSC_6164.NEF.xmp DSC_6164.png --core --conf plugins/imageio/format/png/bpp=16 --conf plugins/imageio/format/png/compression=9

Running this from a terminal, darktable-cli immediatle stops saying ‘Getötet’ (killed). Running from a python script, it says it returns -9.

Running that with the option ‘-d all’ shows tons of messages without anything looking wrong.

This export has been running for years without complaint. Has anything changed?

What can I do to analyse the cause of this crash?

Thank you in advance
Matthias

#2

Looks like you’re on some kind of Unix or Linux? I’d check the system logs (on “modern” Linux, with the journalctl command). The message – and your python test – means the darktable process received the SIGKILL signal. I think one way that might happen is when the Out Of Memory Killer springs into action :frowning:

#3

Running darktable-cli again, this time as the only appliaction was successful.

You are right, I am using Linux.
Thank you
Matthias

#4

How large a photo were you processing? What modules? What is your resource size set to?

kofa@eagle:~/darktable$ grep -i resource ~/.config/darktable/darktablerc
resource_default=512 32 128 700
resource_large=700 64 128 900
resource_small=128 16 64 400
resource_unrestricted=16384 1024 128 1024
resourcelevel=large

All those numbers have to be divided by 1024 to give you ratios.
As you can see, mine is set to large, where:

  • the 700 means darktable can take about 70% (700/1024) of the RAM;
  • 64 as the 2nd number tells us that the minimum tiling buffer size is about 6.5% (64/1024) of RAM. According to the manual:

    Note that this setting is largely historic and is no longer of much practical use – you are advised to leave it at its default value.

  • about 13% (128/1024) can be used for the thumbnail cache
  • for OpenCL (my card has 6 GB), about 90% (900/1024) of (6 GB - 400 MB) VRAM may be used (according to nvidia-smi, I currently have 1182 MB in use, so that’s quite at the limit, I could lower the 900 if I ran into problems).

See darktable 4.4 user manual - memory & performance tuning