Re: Fresh build on OS X not working (memory)

Gavin Kistner <phrogz(at)mac(dot)com> writes:
> On Apr 30, 2010, at 3:35 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Does the theory of a pre-existing smaller shmem segment make sense from
>> your end? In particular, had you previously had another Postgres server
>> running on that machine, and perhaps killed it ungracefully?

> It seems probably that you have hit the nail squarely on the head. I had installed from the one-click (which was working with the memory changes supplied in the README), and IIRC I tried to kill a few processes in preparation for a manual uninstall before I found the supplied uninstall app. I then compiled and installed from source. When that failed as described earlier, all changes I made to the settings were (as you guessed) through the sysctl -w option without a reboot. The first reboot I had was after I replaced my sysctl.conf wholesale with yours, and all was well.

Yeah, I was able to reproduce the problem locally by kill -9'ing the
postmaster and then enlarging max_connections in postgresql.conf before
trying to restart. In your case it might've been caused by the new
version needing a bit more shared memory rather than by any change in
parameter settings, but the basic issue seems pretty clear now.

I've applied a patch to our CVS to make PG behave more sanely in this
case. It does do the right thing if it recognizes that the shmget
failure is due to a pre-existing segment, but we weren't being
sufficiently careful about distinguishing that from a bad size request.

Thanks for the report!

regards, tom lane