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On our Ubuntu servers, core dumps are currently disabled. If we enable them, and a daemon process crashes, will that impact the time taken for upstart to restart the process?

That is: if my daemon's using, say, 32GB of RAM, does that all have to be written to disk (which might take a while) before upstart can restart the daemon?

Roger Lipscombe
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  • Yes, the data has to be written to disk in order to restart again. That's the whole point of the core dump. It holds the process and writes the data to disk so you can use it for error analysis. You want the dump to contain exactly the data present at the moment of the crash, you can't free up the memory until this process has finished. – Broco Sep 07 '16 at 10:57
  • You could fork the process, let the parent die (so that upstart sees it die), and write the child, though... – Roger Lipscombe Sep 07 '16 at 11:01
  • Sure, if you have enough RAM you can do that. I usually only activate dumps if something crashes frequently, I don't really think it's necessary to make a complete core dump on every crash. – Broco Sep 07 '16 at 11:05

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