Memory allocation of X bytes failed

[Lantern47]

I understand that I'm running this program on a raspberry pi - an admittedly weak machine of only 430M of system memory - but I have 16Gb of swap space available, so in theory it should still (albeit painfully) run without running into memory allocation issues. Despite this, I still receive an error stating "Memory allocation of x bytes failed".

My understanding is that if I'm running the program with the "--no-in-memory-db" option as well, and choosing a RAW output, then the output of the decryption should be immediately on to disk and not onto RAM, so it should work...but it doesn't.

I was thinking, could there be code inherent to the program itself which evaluates when memory has failed to be allocated based on a timer, and so in my case, my machine is judged as having not enough memory when it might actually just be taking longer than the program expects it to take, to allocate the memory in swap space? If not, any idea what I might have done wrong or could do to try getting around the problem?

STDIN:

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ signal-backup-decode -v DEBUG -t RAW --no-in-memory-db --output-path /home/pi/out --password-file "Signal_backup_passwd" /home/pi/signal-2023-08-26-14-34-48.backup

STDOUT:

20:09:19 [INFO] Input file: /home/pi/signal-2023-08-26-14-34-48.backup
20:09:19 [DEBUG] (1) signal_backup_decode::input: Frame type: Header Frame (salt: [6D, 3B, 74, 50, DE, FF, A8, 96, 0B, 12, 00, 64, E1, 35, 6D, A7, B7, A4, 7E, 1F, B0, B2, 20, 4A, 54, CD, C9, F1, FD, 5A, FE, 72] (length: 32), iv: [62, 88, FC, AA, DF, E3, B4, 14, 19, EB, 1B, 66, 04, A4, 4C,
52] (length: 16))
20:11:05 [DEBUG] (2) signal_backup_decode::input: Read frame number 1 with length of 2082591147 bytes
memory allocation of 2082591138 bytes failed
Aborted```

[thomas725]

I stumbled upon your issue when trying to solve mine, which involved the same error message because it tried to allocate over 3GB of RAM on a system that did not have so much available.

I've found that the root cause was that the signal backup file format had changed and this tool needed adaptation to the new format - Luckily I found somebody made a fork that works with backups from newer signal app versions:
https://github.com/pascalgn/signal-backup-decode/tree/support-new-backup-version