Ghidra export out of memory for a large file

[justanotheranonymoususer]

See screenshot below. Can be reproduced with electron.exe, file size: about 120 MB.

[cblichmann]

Hi there!

Can you tell me a few more details? What's the peak amount of memory that the export process uses (roughly)?

How much RAM does your system/VM have (relevant because various JVMs set different max heap size defaults)? Any special JVM settings in `support\launch.properties'?

And finally, as I have never tested with Amazon Corretto, can you please try with a recent OpenJDK build, from the official site.

[justanotheranonymoususer]

Hi!

What's the peak amount of memory that the export process uses (roughly)?

Is starts with "exporting instructions" at about 3 GB, then grows slowly but steadily until it fails at about 9 GB.

Here's a boring video of it (speed x25): https://imgur.com/KDLyxLX

How much RAM does your system/VM have

32 GB, I'm running on a physical PC, not a VM.

Any special JVM settings in `support\launch.properties'?

No, everything is set to default.

can you please try with a recent OpenJDK build

I'll see if I can get it running...

[cblichmann]

I see. I just now loaded the most recent version of electron.exe into Ghidra 9.2 on my Mac. It's still disassembling, though.

Will try this out for myself as soon as it's done.

[cblichmann]

I stopped Ghidra after 1h and 84%, as it was clearly not going anywhere. Situation is similar to yours, it hovers at around 9.1GiB and the garbage collector is running wild on 4 cores.

For comparison, I have exported the file with IDA Pro, which took 1.5h to finish the initial auto-analysis. The native BinExport plugin took another 14m 45s to produce a protobuf that is 661MiB in size.

What I suspect is going on is a) Ghidra limits its heap space somewhere and b) the Java Protobuf bindings are at a disadvantage by requiring tons of Builder objects to be created, leading to intense GC pressure.

[justanotheranonymoususer]

Ghidra limits its heap space somewhere

According to this comment: NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra#1997 (comment), that's correct. I'll try to increase the limit and see whether it helps.

Not sure about b.

[justanotheranonymoususer]

It worked! Peak memory usage: 17 GB:
https://i.imgur.com/bAOqDUl.png
What's strange is that the memory usage stays at 17 GB after the export. Perhaps there's a huge memory leak, which can explain the problem.

[Martmists-GH]

Still an issue on latest version, setting MAXMEM to 28G did not resolve the issue.