Re: Lyris looking to help fix PostgresSQL crashing problems

John Buckman wrote:
> > John Buckman <john@lyris.com> writes:
> > > It seems that with larger database sizes (500,000 rows and larger) and
> > > high stress, the server daemon has a tendency to core.
> 
> > We'd love to see some stack traces ...
> 
> Yeah, I just didn't know what form this list prefers to work on
> things, which is why I'd prefer to hire a regular participant
> of this list.  If gcc 'where' stack traces are what you want,
> we can do that.

Yep, in most cases, the crash creates a core file in the database
directory.  A backtrace of that core file is usually a good start.  You
should to sure there are debugging symbols in the binary (gcc -g).

The server log files also often contain valuable information.

> I suspect that the problems may be platform-or-build related,
> because we've often had trouble replicating customer problems
> on our own systems. For example, we had many reports of problems
> with 7.2.x, and saw it crash often on a customer's redhat machine
> that we had ssh access to, but couldn't make it crash in our
> own lab. :(  That's why we need help.  If we could make a simple
> C test case that crashed pgsql, I'm sure you guys could fix the
> problem in a jiffy.

Yes, that does make it harder, but a backtrace usually gets us started. 
It may also be tickling some OS bug or a hardware failure, or a simple
exhaustion of some resource.

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