Re: A memory leak. Postgres 7.4. Mac OS. X Server

Hi,

this is just a me too message. We have 7.4.2 running which
was build from fink (I guess same compiler settings).

My investigation so far is that:
- the system will eat more and more memory and will start swapping
to hard disk
- no performance hits so far (I haven't noticed any)
- the system will crash when the partition where the swap files reside
is full
- stopping the connections will free up the virtual memory reported in
top
- stopping postmaster will free up the disk space used for swapping and
will bring back everything to "normal"
- top will report nothing unusual (no large VSIZE, RSIZE, RSHRD values
per process), just a large total of virtual memory

Settings:
shared_buffers = 12500 # 12500*8.2kB + 1 MB = shmem ~=100MB

/etc/rc
sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmmax=268435456
sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmmin=1
sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmmni=32
sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmseg=8
sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmall=65536

We've got about 50 concurrent connections (WebApp, via JDBC...)
OSX Server 10.3.4, on XServe G5 2x2Ghz

Another thing is that we have a C trigger that will do replication on
update/insert/delete.

The whole setup was fine when running on 10.2.x and 7.3.4.

Anyway, I don't know if this is a postgres problem or an OSX 10.3.4
problem.

If you have any hints or places or tools that I could use to analyze the
problem more throughly, I'd be very glad (right now we're down to
rebooting
the system every week).

The DB has one large table with around 1.6 million rows.

Thanks

Christian

On May 21, 2004, at 10:15 PM, PAviles(at)its(dot)co(dot)cr wrote:

>
> Hi,
> we have a postgresql 7.4 database server on an  X Server with Mac OS
> 10.3.3, 7F45
> The server  possess two CPU's, 4 Gb in memory, and an adequate space
> on disk.
> The service run fine in the majority of time. But, we see the memory
> go down, bit by bit. (A memory leak).
> No errors are produced, but the memory is missing, and then we need to
> restart the service (pg_ctl restart) to clean the busy memory. Before
> the reload, the postgres run slow (by the lack of memory, I think!).
> Postgres was compiled with gcc 3.3, with fink on stable (read line,
> open ssl),
> and with CFLAGS= -03-mtune=970 -funroll-loops
> The parameters used was: /configure --with-includes=/sw/include
> --with-libraries=/sw/lib --prefix=/sw --with-rendevouz
>
> Regards
>
>
> Pablo Avilés Cisneros
> Area Manager
> Software Research and Development Area
> Development and Research, ITS
> San José,Costa Rica
> email: paviles(at)its(dot)co(dot)cr
> phone: (506) 2110319
> cel: (506) 8444312