Re: [HACKERS] Re: ERROR: out of free buffers: time to abort !

Ed Loehr <eloehr(at)austin(dot)rr(dot)com> writes:
>> I am seeing the following error during a DB rebuild. It is
>> occuring during the execution of a PL/pgSQL procedure which is
>> called from a trigger procedure on an AFTER INSERT trigger...
>>
>> ERROR: out of free buffers: time to abort !
>>
>> The insert fails. This is under pgsql 6.5.2, redhat 6.1, built
>> from tgz, running under "postmaster -i -N 15 -o -F -S 4096"...

> This problem disappears when I up the number of shared mem buffers
> with the -B flag from default of 64 to 256.

That's the message you get if all the disk buffers are marked as
"in use" (ref count > 0) so that there is noplace to read in another
database page. I fixed several nasty buffer-ref-count-leakage bugs
a couple of months ago, so I think this problem may be gone in current
sources. (I'd appreciate it if you'd try this test case as soon as
we are ready for 7.0 beta...)

In the meantime, upping the number of buffers will at least postpone the
problem. But I'm worried that it may not solve it completely --- you
may still find that the error occurs after you've been running long
enough.

regards, tom lane