Re: postmaster deadlock while logging after syslogger exited

David Pacheco <dap(at)joyent(dot)com> writes:
> I ran into what appears to be a deadlock in the logging subsystem. It
> looks like what happened was that the syslogger process exited because it
> ran out of memory. But before the postmaster got a chance to handle the
> SIGCLD to restart it, it handled a SIGUSR1 to start an autovacuum worker.
> That also failed, and the postmaster went to log a message about it, but
> it's blocked on the pipe that's normally connected to the syslogger,
> presumably because the pipe is full because the syslogger is gone and
> hasn't read from it.

Ugh.

> ... that process appears to have exited due to a fatal error
> (out of memory). (I know it exited because the process still exists in the
> kernel -- it hasn't been reaped yet -- and I think it ran out of memory
> based on a log message I found from around the time when the process
> exited.)

Could we see the exact log message(s) involved? It's pretty hard to
believe that the logger would have consumed much memory.

regards, tom lane