Re: URGENT: Database keeps crashing - suspect damaged RAM

Hi!

Thank you - that clears up my confusion about swap available being
smaller than the swap partition :)
sort_mem is set to 65534, following the recommendation about setting it
to 2-4% of available physical RAM.
If shmmax were the issue, the postmaster would refuse to start up - so
this isn't it either; I took care of both filemax and shmmax - and the
very same configuration is working on our fallback-machine under the
same environment (application, load, database, data) without any
trouble.

I upgraded the kernel of the machine to 2.4.16 - there are no RPMs for
and not very much experience with SuSE 7.3 and 2.4.19 yet and I'm quite
cautious when it comes to the kernel; I do know how to configure and
compile the kernel, but on a production machine I leave this to SuSE :)

Taking into account that this thing does work when run on a different
machine, I think bad RAM is my best bet. But there's only one way to
know for shure - I'll go and find out tomorrow.

Regards,

Markus

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: scott.marlowe
Gesendet: Di 06.08.2002 20:51
An: Markus Wollny
Cc: pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org
Betreff: Re: [GENERAL] URGENT: Database keeps crashing - suspect
damaged RAM

A couple of points, one is that the linux kernel (if memory
serves) is
limited to 2 gig swap partitions, but can have more than one
swap. In
fact, it is quite advantageous on a server that winds up
swapping, to have
several partitions spread about on all the platters you can, as
the kernel
will then interleave swap access across all the drives for
maximum
performance.

What are your settings for sort_mem in postgresql?
Note that large values for sortmem can starve your machine for
memory very
quickly, but only under load, and only when things need to be
sorted.

I assume nothing like file-max or shmmax are the issue either?