Re: Postgres 8.4.20 seqfault on RHEL 6.4

Dave Johansen <davejohansen(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> I'm running Postgres 8.4.20 on RHEL 6.4 and it will occasionally crash. The
> postgres.log file just says that a PID was terminated. The output from
> dmesg has a message like this one:
> postmaster[22905]: segfault at 686 ip 0000000000000686 sp 00007fff83d72e88
> error 14 in postgres[400000+463000]

> What can I do to try and figure out what is causing the crash and fix it?

(1) install relevant postgresql-debuginfo package (assuming we're talking
about a Red Hat-originated postgres package)

(2) run postmaster under "ulimit -c unlimited" (easiest way is probably
to add such a command to /etc/rc.d/init.d/postgresql and restart the
service)

(3) wait for crash

(4) gdb the resulting corefile (should be under your $PGDATA directory)

(5) send in a stack trace.

Keep in mind that 8.4.x is out of support so far as the PG community is
concerned, so we're unlikely to expend any great amount of effort on
this; but we can take a quick look at a stack trace to see if it looks
like a known problem.

regards, tom lane