Re: BUG #5278: Postgres hangs / crashes every day

"Murali" <nmmreddy11(at)hotmail(dot)com> writes:
> Postgres hangs / crashes every day (gets corrupted?). It neither serves any
> requests from connected applications nor accepts new connections. I cant
> connect to the data base through PG Admin also. Below given is the log
> snippet at the time of failure.

> Log Snippet1:
> 2009-12-16 10:59:11 FATAL: could not open relation 17253/33902/16729: No
> such file or directory

> Log Snippet2:
> 2009-12-16 09:44:50 ERROR: could not open relation 17253/33902/16691:
> Permission denied

Given that last, I'd bet that most of your problems come from broken
antivirus software. Remove it. Do not trust that excluding PG's data
folder is sufficient. In fact, don't trust that turning the AV code off
is sufficient. Uninstall it.

There's some information about AV compatibility here:
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Running_%26_Installing_PostgreSQL_On_Native_Windows#What_Anti-Virus_software_is_compatible.3F
but unexpected permissions errors are a smoking gun that should trump
anything at all anyone may claim about particular AV code being okay.

It's fairly likely that the AV code's interference has created
corruption in your database, if Postgres was able to write some files
but was prevented from making other parts of the same logical update.
Once you're rid of the unexpected permissions errors, a dump and reload
would be a good idea to try to get back to a clean state.

The other thing you ought to consider is moving onto a supported version
of Postgres. 8.0.6 is very old and has got numerous known bugs,
particularly when running on Windows. You need at least
8.2.something-recent.

regards, tom lane