Re: full data disk -- any chance of recovery

Tom Lane conjured forth the following characters:

>
> > Might want to turn off dumping of core files; I believe man ulimit is
> > the place to look.
>
> Actually, as a developer I would've first wanted to look into the core
> files and try to see why they showed up in the first place. A gdb stack
> trace would often tell something useful (... if not to you, then to
> someone on the -hackers list ...). Cleaning up after a problem is fine,
> but don't destroy the evidence until you've learned as much as you can
> towards preventing the problem from happening again.

We'll be a month or so to switching to 8.1, so I am sure that we'll have another core file which can kept. To the truth I haven't pursued this much because
(a) it's an old revision and if time is to be spent swatting bugs it is better spent on current software, and besides it may a result of something already fixed;
(b) we're almost certain that this is a result of catastrophic failures in postGIS/GEOS under load. We typically see a few connections go crazy and eat up all the RAM and CPU time; sometimes we've had to reboot to get things calm again. Our testing of 8.0 w/ postGIS 1.0 led us to conclude that we will see far less of this, in that when we replayed a day's traffic to the databases we saw no errors versus dozens from the same traffic on 7.4.

When I do find another core I'll people know if you care; the chances are quite good that we find the opportunity.

Alas, moving large systems in a company sometimes requires the subtle skills of a cat herder combined with the social tact of an offensive linebacker.

Thanks again,

G