Re: What could cause total crash of a postgres installation?

I'hve also had some crashes that circle around memory management
particularly free-ing
memory.....

In my case it has to to with a functiion called pfree() which is a macro
on top of free().

Peter Alberer wrote:

>Hi,
>
>Since about three days I am having strange problems with my postgresl
>installation. Today in the morning at about 2am the database crashed
>completely. I had the postmaster running at debug level 2 but no hint
>can be found in the log. The server seemed to crash without notice.
>
>2002-11-29 02:39:01 [3294]   DEBUG:  StartTransactionCommand
>2002-11-29 02:39:01 [3294]   DEBUG:  query: select preface as
>preface_txt,abstract as abstract_txt,display_type,section_auto_
>numbering,lr_book_revision_id as revision_id from lr_books where
>lr_book_revision_id = '115876';
>2002-11-29 02:39:01 [3294]   DEBUG:  ProcessQuery
>2002-11-29 02:39:01 [3294]   DEBUG:  CommitTransactionCommand
>2002-11-29 02:39:01 [3294]   DEBUG:  QUERY STATISTICS
>! system usage stats:
>!       0.001286 elapsed 0.000000 user 0.000000 system sec
>!       [456.870000 user 12.170000 sys total]
>!       0/0 [0/0] filesystem blocks in/out
>!       0/0 [57092/25680] page faults/reclaims, 0 [0] swaps
>!       0 [0] signals rcvd, 0/0 [0/0] messages rcvd/sent
>!       0/0 [0/0] voluntary/involuntary context switches
>! postgres usage stats:
>!       Shared blocks:          0 read,          0 written, <- last
>entry
>
>At that time more or less nothing was going on in the system. I was
>already collection all kinds of log information, but I can find nothing
>unusual. I could start the database with no problems.
>
>What kind of problems could cause such a crash? Could bad memory
>settings (sort, buffers) cause something like that? What kind of server
>statistics should I look at?
>
>Many TIA,
>
>peter
>
>
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