Re: Mysterious Death of postmaster (-9)

Thanks Alvaro and Steven -- this may in fact be what happened as the monitor showed that at about that time memory definitely was taxed and showed oddnesses.

I'll read up on this -- thanks very much for the (promising) clue!

Greg W.

-----Original Message-----
From: Alvaro Herrera [mailto:alvherre(at)dcc(dot)uchile(dot)cl]
Sent: Sat 11/13/2004 3:06 PM
To: Gregory S. Williamson
Cc: pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] Mysterious Death of postmaster (-9)
On Sat, Nov 13, 2004 at 02:39:38PM -0800, Gregory S. Williamson wrote:

Gregory,

> We had an oddness today with one of of postgres servers (Dell 2 CPU box
> running linux) and postgres 7.4. The server was under heavy load (50+ for a 1
> minutes spike; about 20 for the 15 minute average) with about 250 connections
> (we still don't understand the heavy load itself).
>
> Looking in the logs I see:
> 2004-11-13 13:30:28 LOG: unexpected EOF on client connection
> 2004-11-13 13:30:40 LOG: unexpected EOF on client connection
> 2004-11-13 13:38:28 LOG: could not send data to client: Broken pipe
> 2004-11-13 13:42:15 LOG: server process (PID 30272) was terminated by signal 9

This looks an awful lot like the Linux Out-Of-Memory killer got you.
This happens when the Linux kernel overcommits memory. There is something
about this on the documentation, and has been discussed in the past
here. Please see the archives (www.pgsql.ru; look for "OOM killer" and
"linux overcommit").

Luckily it didn't get your postmaster, as has happenned to other
people ...

--
Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[(at)]dcc(dot)uchile(dot)cl>)
"XML!" Exclaimed C++. "What are you doing here? You're not a programming
language."
"Tell that to the people who use me," said XML.