Re: Server Crash

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Scott Marlowe [mailto:scott.marlowe@gmail.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, April 22, 2008 10:13 AM
> To: Hajek, Nick
> Cc: pgsql-admin@postgresql.org
> Subject: Re: [ADMIN] Server Crash
>
> On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 8:14 AM, Hajek, Nick
> <Nick.Hajek@vishay.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > All,
> > We experienced a crash of a Postgresql server which from the log
> > appears to have began with this entry:
> >
> > Log:  background writer process (PID 3457) was terminated
> by signal 9
>
> Kill -9 is the "shoot it in the head" signal.  It is not
> generated by postgresql in normal operation.  It can be
> generated by "pg_ctl -m immediate stop" .  At least I think
> that's what signal it sends.
>
> Anyway, the most common cause of kill -9s randomly showing up
> in linux is the OOM killer.
>
> It's quite possible you're running your machine out of memory
> / swap somehow and linux is killing the biggest, fattest
> process it can find, which is pgsql.
>
> you might wanna run vmstat 1 to see what's happening during
> these times.
>

Bingo.  I checked the syslog and found the OOM killer and indications
that the free swap space was zero.  Now I just need to find what's
eating memory.  Thanks for the help.