`PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 536870912 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 11605029 bytes) in /var/www/html/nextcloud/apps/mail/lib/Db/MessageMapper.php on line 583`

[hboetes]

Steps to reproduce

I regularly get emails like that from the cronjob: /usr/bin/php -f /var/www/html/nextcloud/cron.php. Please tell if you want me to run some debug commands to get more informative output.

Expected behavior

No memory overload. :-}

Actual behavior

Memory overload.

Mail app version

4.1.2

Nextcloud version

30.0.5

Mailserver or service

postfix

Operating system

Fedora

PHP engine version

PHP 8.3

Nextcloud memory caching

'memcache.local' => '\OC\Memcache\Redis', 'memcache.locking' => '\OC\Memcache\Redis', 'memcache.distributed' => '\OC\Memcache\Redis',

Web server

Nginx

Database

PostgreSQL

Additional info

No response

[SebastianKrupinski]

Hi @hboetes

Is there any indication to which background job is causing this? Is there more details in the nextcloud.log? Otherwise this error might be hard to track down.

[hboetes]

Would this help? I simply searched for MessageMapper in the log, and then grepped for the matching log entry strings. I'm not a noob, but I have no idea how to debug this problem. Please make some suggestions.

root@bran /var/log/nextcloud # grep 1FUn7BlKfr8bgkdCHu8u log
{"reqId":"1FUn7BlKfr8bgkdCHu8u","level":0,"time":"2025-02-02T11:20:00+00:00","remoteAddr":"","user":"--","app":"cron","method":"","url":"--","message":"CLI cron call has selected job OCA\\Notifications\\BackgroundJob\\GenerateUserSettings (id: 10, arguments: null)","userAgent":"--","version":"30.0.5.1","data":{"app":"cron"}}
{"reqId":"1FUn7BlKfr8bgkdCHu8u","level":3,"time":"2025-02-02T11:20:33+00:00","remoteAddr":"","user":"--","app":"PHP","method":"","url":"--","message":"iconv(): Detected an illegal character in input string at /var/www/html/nextcloud/apps/mail/lib/IMAP/Charset/Converter.php#43","userAgent":"--","version":"30.0.5.1","data":{"app":"PHP"}}
{"reqId":"1FUn7BlKfr8bgkdCHu8u","level":3,"time":"2025-02-02T11:20:34+00:00","remoteAddr":"","user":"--","app":"PHP","method":"","url":"--","message":"iconv(): Detected an illegal character in input string at /var/www/html/nextcloud/apps/mail/lib/IMAP/Charset/Converter.php#43","userAgent":"--","version":"30.0.5.1","data":{"app":"PHP"}}
{"reqId":"1FUn7BlKfr8bgkdCHu8u","level":3,"time":"2025-02-02T11:20:42+00:00","remoteAddr":"","user":"--","app":"PHP","method":"","url":"--","message":"iconv(): Detected an illegal character in input string at /var/www/html/nextcloud/apps/mail/lib/IMAP/Charset/Converter.php#43","userAgent":"--","version":"30.0.5.1","data":{"app":"PHP"}}
{"reqId":"1FUn7BlKfr8bgkdCHu8u","level":3,"time":"2025-02-02T11:20:43+00:00","remoteAddr":"","user":"--","app":"PHP","method":"","url":"--","message":"iconv(): Detected an illegal character in input string at /var/www/html/nextcloud/apps/mail/lib/IMAP/Charset/Converter.php#43","userAgent":"--","version":"30.0.5.1","data":{"app":"PHP"}}
{"reqId":"1FUn7BlKfr8bgkdCHu8u","level":3,"time":"2025-02-02T11:21:21+00:00","remoteAddr":"","user":"--","app":"PHP","method":"","url":"--","message":"iconv(): Detected an illegal character in input string at /var/www/html/nextcloud/apps/mail/lib/IMAP/Charset/Converter.php#43","userAgent":"--","version":"30.0.5.1","data":{"app":"PHP"}}
{"reqId":"1FUn7BlKfr8bgkdCHu8u","level":3,"time":"2025-02-02T11:21:22+00:00","remoteAddr":"","user":"--","app":"PHP","method":"","url":"--","message":"iconv(): Detected an illegal character in input string at /var/www/html/nextcloud/apps/mail/lib/IMAP/Charset/Converter.php#43","userAgent":"--","version":"30.0.5.1","data":{"app":"PHP"}}
{"reqId":"1FUn7BlKfr8bgkdCHu8u","level":3,"time":"2025-02-02T11:21:25+00:00","remoteAddr":"","user":"--","app":"PHP","method":"","url":"--","message":"iconv(): Detected an illegal character in input string at /var/www/html/nextcloud/apps/mail/lib/IMAP/Charset/Converter.php#43","userAgent":"--","version":"30.0.5.1","data":{"app":"PHP"}}
{"reqId":"1FUn7BlKfr8bgkdCHu8u","level":3,"time":"2025-02-02T11:21:25+00:00","remoteAddr":"","user":"--","app":"PHP","method":"","url":"--","message":"iconv(): Detected an illegal character in input string at /var/www/html/nextcloud/apps/mail/lib/IMAP/Charset/Converter.php#43","userAgent":"--","version":"30.0.5.1","data":{"app":"PHP"}}
{"reqId":"1FUn7BlKfr8bgkdCHu8u","level":3,"time":"2025-02-02T12:09:24+00:00","remoteAddr":"","user":"--","app":"PHP","method":"","url":"--","message":"Allowed memory size of 536870912 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 11605029 bytes) at /var/www/html/nextcloud/apps/mail/lib/Db/MessageMapper.php#583","userAgent":"--","version":"30.0.5.1","data":{"app":"PHP"}}

[ChristophWurst]

@SebastianKrupinski 🏓

[SebastianKrupinski]

Hi @hboetes

I was hoping the log entry would more information but this will have to do.

Looks like its the PreviewEnhancer background job, its failing when trying to update the database. I am guessing that you have a large mailbox and the job is trying to process too many messages at once.

A quick work around would be to increase the memory limit for PHP, try 1024MB, or 2048MB, once the job runs a couple times you can decrease it to 512MB again. As those messages will not need to be processed again.

[hboetes]

I just reinstalled the mail application and increased the php-fpm memory limit to 8Gb and the error is gone. Feels like a workaround indeed. Why would scanning a bunch of emails in the background take up so much memory? The limit was 512Mb. My largest email is 16Mb.