We have a website which uses imagick/imagemagick to create thumbnails from a PDF. One day it stopped working, generating the error "Delegate failed".

We've asked out hosting company to look into it, and they've tried all they can. We've had our PHP code checked and it seems to be fine. We hadn't changed anything when the site stopped working.

What we want to do now, is remove the current version of imagemagick and imagick, and re-install the latest versions. Currently we have v2.2.0 of imagick installed, and the latest stable version is 2.2.2.

We're running Centos and Plesk.

Could someone assist me in removing these applications and re-installing please?

Hi

Also check ghostscript. Imagemagick uses it, and the "Delegate failed" is probably Ghostscript. I would make a PHP page with passthru("gs -v") and see if it is still installed.

You can also get this error message on corrupt PDF files, so if it tries again and again on the same PDF, it could be the reason.

When I do that I get;

"ESP Ghostscript 8.15.2 (2006-04-19) Copyright (C) 2004 artofcode LLC, Benicia, CA. All rights reserved."

I've looked around the internet a bit more, and there's a suggestion that gs isn't in the apache path. It seems to be in the /usr/bin folder, is that within the apache path?

Hi

Well it is in the path, otherwise "gs -v" would have failed.

Imagemagick's convert has an option called -verbose. It displays the ghostscript command as well as other things. Maybe you will get a better error message or some other hints about what the problem is?

convert -verbose somefile.pdf /tmp/somefile.png

By the way, imagick is a PHP module and imagemagick is a set of command line tools. So even if the command line tools work, there might be something wrong about imagick. Do you know anything about how these thumbnails are made? If this is a web application coded by someone else, it could be it uses imagick if installed, otherwise imagemagick. So disabling the imagick module might help, it would we slightly slower, but not very much.

The PDF converts fine from the command line, i.e. using convert. The problem is via PHP which is using Imagick, which as you say in a PHP module.

The problem is, Imagick is running imagemagick, and it's imagemagick that passing the error back, rather than Imagick.

I'm at a loose end with this problem, and think I'll probably have to recode the application to run a command via exec rather than going through imagick.

I did the same some time ago. Imagick crashed for mysterious reasons and I think the documentation was horrible. Using exec isn't much slower and it became a lot more stable.