Re: stuck spinlock. Aborting. What does this mean?

Markus Bertheau <twanger(at)bluetwanger(dot)de> writes:
> On Fri, 2001-12-14 at 23:31, Tom Lane wrote:
>> It looks to me like your postmaster crashed because there were no free
>> file descriptors left in the system:

> Does 7.1 or 7.2 behave differently when confronted with such a
> situation?

I believe we've fixed the particular case you exhibited as of 7.1.
Can't swear that there are no similar problems anywhere, however.

In practice, being out of file descriptors will take down most parts
of a Unix system, so whether the postmaster is bulletproof or not is
not all that interesting a question. The only practical way to proceed
is to make sure that the situation never happens. 7.2 has a config
variable that can be used to limit Postgres' appetite for file
descriptors, even when the kernel lies about its ability to provide
lots of descriptors (unfortunately a common practice).

regards, tom lane