We have made numerous experiments today with TeX Live 2008 pdf(la)tex
to understand and simplify the problem of giant (multi-TB or multi-PB)
files being created.
I now have a simple test case that exhibits the problem, and
experiments show that it manifests itself only on Sun Solaris SPARC.
On a ZFS system, I see something like this:
% pdflatex bug.tex
...
% ls -l bug.pdf
-rw-rw-r-- 1 beebe beebe 116951959477640 Sep 8 16:38 bug.pdf
% ls -lh bug.pdf
-rw-rw-r-- 1 beebe beebe 107T Sep 8 16:38 bug.pdf
ZFS is Sun's Zettabyte File System, an advanced high-performance
filesystem that provides high reliability, snapshotting, indifference
to disk sizes, trivial size expansion, and a capability of addressing
10**21 bytes of diskspace. For details, see, e.g.,
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/zfs.jsp
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/whatis/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS
We have been running this filesystem for about four years now, the
last two of which have been in production mode with thousands of
users, whose home directories reside in ZFS.
On a UFS Solaris SPARC system (/var/tmp), I see this:
% pdflatex bug.tex
...
pdflatex: bug: File too large
% ls -l bug.df
-rw-rw-r-- 1 beebe beebe 6318 Sep 8 16:37 bug.pdf
I just did a test reinstallation of the latest TeX Live 2008 tree from
-rw-rw-r-- 1 mirror mirror 3128049 Sep 7 19:43 ctan/tex-archive/systems/texlive/tlnet/2008/install-tl.zip
into a temporary directory, and repeated the experiment. The bug is
still there, so I'm leaving our current 2008 installation unchanged.
Here is the test file:
% cat bug.tex
\documentclass[]{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\begin{document}
This is a picture of a golfer:
\centerline{\includegraphics[width = 0.5\textwidth]{cgolfer}}
\end{document}
The cgolfer.pdf file can be found here:
http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/cgolfer.pdf
The bug is unrelated to the particular PDF file that is included as a
graphics image.
The bug does NOT appear when versions of pdflatex for the platforms
amd64-freebsd i386-openbsd mips-irix universal-darwin
i386-freebsd i386-solaris powerpc-linux x86_64-linux
i386-linux
are run on the same ZFS filesystem. Thus, the bug appears to be
unique to Solaris SPARC on ZFS. The bug is absent from Solaris on
AMD64 and IA-32. It is also absent from the 2007 edition of TeX Live
for Solaris SPARC.
There is one additional irregularity on Solaris SPARC: when the file
is resident in a non-ZFS filesystem, such as /var/tmp/, I get a
warning message and a bad PDF file:
% pdflatex bug.tex
...
pdflatex: bug: File too large
% acroread-5.0.10 bug.pdf
... file is damaged and cannot be repaired ...
% acroread-8.1.2 bug.pdf
... file is damaged and cannot be repaired ...
It would be nice if the "File too large" error from pdflatex reported
WHICH file is ``too'' large. I have
% ls -l cgolfer.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 3 beebe staff 30190 Dec 15 1994 cgolfer.pdf
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 -
- University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe at math.utah.edu -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe at acm.org beebe at computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
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