Massive 12mb text files appearing!

Ross1234 · 16 Apr 2008 at 17:49

Help!

I don't know what is causing this, but in my site files keep appearing and they are 12mb text files!

Any ideas? When i open them they just contain garbled nonsense letters

The only words I can make out are ELF and CORE and /lib/ld-linux.so.2

Inquisitor · 16 Apr 2008 at 17:54

Where are they appearing, and what are their names?

Ross1234 · 16 Apr 2008 at 17:59

Inquisitor said:
Where are they appearing, and what are their names?

Im not sure how to know when they appeared, but there names are

core.12606

core.13753

and that sort of thing

They are soon going to take out my hosting though.

Ross1234 · 16 Apr 2008 at 18:01

I am reliably informed that its a core dump from apache. I am on vidahost. I should probably talk to them.

Beansprout · 16 Apr 2008 at 18:02

Contact your hosting company

Ross1234 · 16 Apr 2008 at 18:07

I am using the cms modx. Could this be causing the troubles? If i look further down the file it has the contents of my site templates and chunks from modx

Visage · 17 Apr 2008 at 09:28

As stated - they're core dumps.

Basically when an application does something naughty and crashes, the OS will basically store a copy of the applications memory space on disk and then kill the app. The files created are core dumps. There are plenty of apps around that will read the core dump files and tell you what the app was doing when it crashed, but its generally not a trivial thing to do. If you're lucky you *might* be able to get a record of the line of code that was executing when it all went wrong...

Obligatory wiki link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_dump

blade007 · 17 Apr 2008 at 10:15

I'm using MODx and haven't seen the problem that you mention. Maybe a chunk you are using has conflicts and has upset the system.