inscatolati - Get out of the box! :)

If you are stracing a process and are getting an error like "strace: out of memory", watch out: this is not an error in the application, but an error in strace itself.

This message indicates that strace does not have enough memory to create its own structures to strace your process.

Certain versions of strace, still quite widespread as for year 2005/2006, have a bug in tracing multithreaded applications, which confuse strace about the memory it will need to strace the process.

To verify your application is multithreaded, you can use something like "ps -L aux". If your process as more than one line with the same PID, than it is multithreaded.

Updating strace might solve the problem. Another solution might be to start stracing your process before it spawns other threads. So, don't use the strace '-p' parameter, but strace the process since it starts.