Re: [ADMIN] Repeatable crash in pg_dump (with -d2 info)

On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 9:58 AM, Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 04:46:50PM -0500, David Schnur wrote:
>> I finally had time to test this further on a variety of systems, and was unable
>> to reproduce on any non-Windows platform. The dump even works fine on Windows
>> XP; just not Windows 7.
>>
>> This prompted me to do a little more research, and this time I found this
>> thread from Sept. 2011:
>>
>> http://postgresql.1045698.n5.nabble.com/
>> BUG-6233-pg-dump-hangs-with-Access-Violation-C0000005-td4851598.html
>>
>> From Tom Lane in the above thread:
>>
>>
>> Hmm. I can see how that would happen if you're using one of the Windows
>> environments wherein malloc's done inside libpq have to be free'd inside
>> libpq. (The PQExpBuffer support code is in libpq...)
>>
>>
>>
>> However, the flaw in that explanation is that it would basically mean
>> pg_dump doesn't work at all on Windows, at least not if you have any
>> user-defined functions, and probably some other cases too because there
>> seem to be multiple instances of the dubious coding. It's a bit hard to
>> believe that nobody's noticed that before.
>>
>>
>> This appears to describe exactly the issue I'm encountering, and my build is in
>> fact linked against the static runtime. I guess the reason this hasn't come up
>> sooner is because most Windows users either use the 'official' binaries rather
>> than compiling from source, or link against the dynamic runtime.
>>
>> Is this something I could expect to be fixed in the near future, or is it
>> enough of an edge case that I should come up with some solution or work-around
>> on my own? Thanks,
>
> Late reply, but I don't see any way we could fix this easily.

To me it seems like mostly a case of chasing down all the places where
this happens. It's not impossible to do; it's just a bunch of work
that nobody's gotten excited about doing yet. We've fixed similar
issues in many other cases, IIUC.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company