>>> Bill Moran <wmoran@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > In response to Matthew Wakeling <matthew@xxxxxxxxxxx>: >> >> Probably the best solution is to just tell the kernel somehow to never >> kill the postmaster. > > This thread interested me enough to research this a bit. > > In linux, it's possible to tell the OOM killer never to consider > certain processes for the axe, using /proc magic. See this page: > http://linux-mm.org/OOM_Killer > > Perhaps this should be in the PostgreSQL docs somewhere? That sure sounds like a good idea. Even though the one time the OOM killer kicked in on one of our servers, it killed a runaway backend and not the postmaster ( http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-bugs/2008-07/msg00105.php ), I think I will modify our service scripts in /etc/init.d/ to pick off the postmaster pid after a start and echo -16 (or some such) into the /proc/<pid>/oom_adj file (which is where I found the file on my SuSE system). Thanks for the research and the link! -Kevin
