Tar extraction consumes several GB of memory

Solution Verified - Updated -

Issue

  • When extracting a Tar archive containing many symbolic links, Tar consumes several Gigabytes of memory

    # egrep "(VmRSS|VmData)" $(pidof tar)
VmRSS:   2456600 kB
VmData:  2456048 kB

  • Eventually, when not enough memory can be committed, Tar program gets killed by OOM killer, as seen in the system log excerpt below

    <DATE> <HOSTNAME> kernel: Out of memory: Kill process <PID> (tar) score <SCORE> or sacrifice child

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux
    • tar

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