Re: Postgres connection failures

Mark van Cuijk <postgresql(dot)org-pgsql-general-41(at)45cents(dot)nl> writes:
> Im developing an application using Postgres and when doing a transaction with a bunch of INSERT statements, the connection to the server (on localhost) often suddenly dies. Trying to diagnose the problem, Ive increased log levels and Ive run a tcpdump session to find out whats going on, can someone spot something strange or point me in a direction to continue debugging?

> The symptom I notice is that the Postgres server (9.1 from Ubuntu repo) closes the connection, sometimes by sending a TCP FIN, sometimes by sending a TCP RST, but Im not sure why this happens. The (node.js / node-postgres-pure) client doesnt report any error message that could have been received from the server; it only complains that the connection unexpectedly closed during query execution.

Your log extract looks like the server side thought it got a connection
closure command. In particular, the server process seems to have exited
normally, and it did not write "LOG: unexpected EOF on client connection",
which it would have done if the TCP connection dropped without receipt of
such a command.

Based on these facts, I'm going to speculate that your client application
is multi-threaded and some thread is closing a connection out from under
another one. It's usually best to have only one thread touching a
particular connection; or if you want to maintain a connection pool
yourself, be very sure you have clear acquire and release rules.

regards, tom lane