Craig A. James wrote:
For the third time today, our server has crashed, or frozen, actually
something in between. Normally there are about 30-50 connections
because of mod_perl processes that keep connections open. After the
crash, there are three processes remaining:
# ps -ef | grep postgres
postgres 23832 1 0 Nov11 pts/1 00:02:53
/usr/local/pgsql/bin/postmaster -D /postgres/main
postgres 1200 23832 20 14:28 pts/1 00:58:14 postgres: pubchem
pubchem 66.226.76.106(58882) SELECT
postgres 4190 23832 25 14:33 pts/1 01:09:12 postgres: asinex
asinex 66.226.76.106(56298) SELECT
But they're not doing anything: No CPU time consumed, no I/O going on,
no progress. If I try to connect with psql(1), it says:
psql: FATAL: the database system is in recovery mode
And the server log has:
LOG: background writer process (PID 23874) was terminated by signal 9
LOG: terminating any other active server processes
LOG: statistics collector process (PID 23875) was terminated by signal 9
WARNING: terminating connection because of crash of another server
process
DETAIL: The postmaster has commanded this server process to roll back
the current transaction and exit, because another server process
exited ab
normally and possibly corrupted shared memory.
HINT: In a moment you should be able to reconnect to the database and
repeat your command.
WARNING: terminating connection because of crash of another server
process
DETAIL: The postmaster has commanded this server process to roll back
the current transaction and exit, because another server process
exited ab
... repeats about 50 times, one per process.
Questions:
1. Any idea what happened and how I can avoid this? It's a *big*
problem.
2. Why didn't the database recover? Why are there two processes
that couldn't be killed?
3. Where did the "signal 9" come from? (Nobody but me ever logs
in to the server machine.)
I would guess it's the linux OOM if you are running linux. You need to
turn off killing of processes when you run out of memory. Are you
getting close to running out of memory?
Help!
Thanks,
Craig
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TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
