Re: Background writer process terminating

On Mon, Mar 28, 2005 at 11:45:06PM -0000, Greg Sabino Mullane wrote:
>
> I have a server running 8.0.1 which keeps terminating. I first noticed this
> today: it has happened about 7 times already.

Could the situation have been going on longer than just today?  How
far back do your logs go?  What, if anything, has changed on the
system since the last time you're certain this problem wasn't
happening?

> Periodically, the background writer process is killed and drags
> the rest of the server down with it.

Is there any pattern to "periodically"?

> Most times PG restarts on its own, but twice I've found a dead server on
> the floor and had to resusciate it manually with pg_ctl start. Here's a log
> snippet:
>
> <2005-03-28 12:28:27 EST >LOG:  background writer process (PID 17409) was terminated by signal 9

Any chance you have a "terminate with extreme prejudice" daemon or
cron job that kills processes meeting certain conditions?  Do you
see any pattern in the timestamps when this happens?

--
Michael Fuhr
http://www.fuhr.org/~mfuhr/