Re: FATAL: invalid frontend message type 8

Steve Crawford <scrawford(at)pinpointresearch(dot)com> writes:
> I've started seeing the following in my logs:
> FATAL: invalid frontend message type 8

> I searched back over a month and there are 5 instances of this error
> of which 4 are in the last 24 hours.

> I could not find this error defined. Any ideas of what it means, it's
> severity, how to track the cause and cure?

It looks to me like you've got an erroneous client that is sending bad
data. The error is from tcop/postgres.c, when it doesn't recognize the
first byte of what should be a message:

default:
/*
* Otherwise we got garbage from the frontend. We treat this
* as fatal because we have probably lost message boundary
* sync, and there's no good way to recover.
*/
ereport(FATAL,
(errcode(ERRCODE_PROTOCOL_VIOLATION),
errmsg("invalid frontend message type %d", qtype)));

Can you determine exactly which client-side code is provoking the error?

regards, tom lane