Got error 12 when reading table

[Nathan Cheng]

From the documentation I can see that error 12 is a memory allocation error. What memory settings do we need to tweak so that we stop getting this error? Or is the only solution to add more physical memory?

The tables io_export_message_blob and inbox both contain longblob columns and are both MyIsam type with larger than normal MAX_ROWS.

The log below continues for tens of thousands of lines, with "error 12" happening more and more often, for simpler and simpler queries, until just about every query results in an error 12 and mysql must be restarted.

What's going on? Seems like there must be a mysql bug at play here--especially since restarting our application bought us only another 5 minutes, i.e. killing all the db connections didn't cause a significant amount of memory to become reallocatable, so there must be a memory leak somewhere.

Here's the partial log:

050622 19:39:14 mysqld started
050622 19:39:15 InnoDB: Started; log sequence number 5 1553385283
/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqld: ready for connections.
Version: '4.1.9-standard-log' socket: '/tmp/mysql.sock' port: 3306 Official MySQL-standard binary
050706 20:35:32 [ERROR] Got error 12 when reading table './newco/io_export_message_blob'
050706 20:43:15 [ERROR] Got error 12 when reading table './mail/inbox'
050706 20:45:34 [ERROR] Got error 12 when reading table './newco/io_export_message_blob'
050706 21:35:37 [ERROR] Got error 12 when reading table './newco/io_export_message_blob'
050706 21:50:37 [ERROR] Got error 12 when reading table './newco/io_export_message_blob'
050706 22:05:39 [ERROR] Got error 12 when reading table './newco/io_export_message_blob'
050706 22:20:39 [ERROR] Got error 12 when reading table './newco/io_export_message_blob'
050706 22:35:41 [ERROR] Got error 12 when reading table './newco/io_export_message_blob'
050707 11:30:39 [ERROR] /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqld: Got error 12 from storage engine
050707 11:30:39 [ERROR] /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqld: Sort aborted
...