Crash logs (was RE: full data disk -- any chance of recovery )

Back in the way-back Tom Lane wrote:
>
> 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.

Well, I have a few core files:
[postgres(at)pgdb-05 138602992]$ !ls
ls -lt core*
-rw------- 1 postgres gxadmin 13897603 Jan 6 17:04 core.19845.gz
-rw------- 1 postgres gxadmin 24929043 Jan 6 17:02 core.18841.gz
-rw------- 1 postgres gxadmin 17264683 Jan 4 17:15 core.18996.gz
-rw------- 1 postgres gxadmin 5949066 Jan 4 17:13 core.17007.gz
-rw------- 1 postgres gxadmin 24513490 Jan 4 17:12 core.15891.gz
-rw------- 1 postgres gxadmin 24830413 Jan 4 16:38 core.11317.gz

I can probably find a way to put them on our site for ftp retrieval next week, if there is any interest.

It a tribute to postgres that there are so many, so close in time !

Well, ok, it is bad there are crashes but this 7.4 with an early postGIS version (which I think is the real problem -- I will bet that we see far fewer crashes with current releases, especially in the postGIS side o' things). But I've seen other databases crash and either need a manual restart or even a reboot of the afflicted server, and then a while to recover. Admittedly, this database is a read-only DB with few but large updates. Still -- 2 minutes to recover and be fatally slain again !! That's wicked fast.

Appended below is a snippet from logs for a recent crash (no outside intervention so whatver signals are sent are either postgres or linux):

But like I've said, I am reasonably certain that 8.1/postGIS 1.0 will be better and I don't want to waste anyone's time chasing after bugs that may have already been swatted.

Cheers,

Greg Williamson
DBA
GlobeXplorer LLC

Log:
2006-01-06 17:02:22 NOTICE: AssertionFailedException: Should never reach here: Unknown Precision Model type encountered
2006-01-06 17:02:22 ERROR: GEOS Intersection() threw an error!
2006-01-06 17:02:23 NOTICE: IllegalArgumentException: LinearRing not closed
2006-01-06 17:02:23 ERROR: Couldnt convert the postgis geometry to GEOS!
2006-01-06 17:02:23 NOTICE: IllegalArgumentException: LinearRing not closed
2006-01-06 17:02:23 ERROR: Couldnt convert the postgis geometry to GEOS!
2006-01-06 17:02:25 LOG: server process (PID 18841) was terminated by signal 11
2006-01-06 17:02:25 LOG: terminating any other active server processes
2006-01-06 17:02:25 WARNING: terminating connection because of crash of another server process
DETAIL: The postmaster has commanded this server process to roll back the current transaction and exit, because another server process exited abnormally and possibly corrupted shared memory.