Re: Postgres 8.4.20 seqfault on RHEL 6.4

On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 4:33 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> Dave Johansen <davejohansen(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> > I'm running Postgres 8.4.20 on RHEL 6.4 and it will occasionally crash.
> The
> > postgres.log file just says that a PID was terminated. The output from
> > dmesg has a message like this one:
> > postmaster[22905]: segfault at 686 ip 0000000000000686 sp
> 00007fff83d72e88
> > error 14 in postgres[400000+463000]
>
> > What can I do to try and figure out what is causing the crash and fix it?
>
> (1) install relevant postgresql-debuginfo package (assuming we're talking
> about a Red Hat-originated postgres package)
>
> (2) run postmaster under "ulimit -c unlimited" (easiest way is probably
> to add such a command to /etc/rc.d/init.d/postgresql and restart the
> service)
>
> (3) wait for crash
>
> (4) gdb the resulting corefile (should be under your $PGDATA directory)
>
> (5) send in a stack trace.
>

Thanks for the info. It will take a little while for me to get this all
approved and setup, but should be helpful info.

Also, could this be caused by an issue or misuse of libpq/libpqxx in our
application? If so, is there someway that we could turn on some sort of
logging logging to see the queries or at least connections that we opening
when or just before the crash happened?

> Keep in mind that 8.4.x is out of support so far as the PG community is
> concerned, so we're unlikely to expend any great amount of effort on
> this; but we can take a quick look at a stack trace to see if it looks
> like a known problem.
>

Yes, we're in the process of working on upgrading to 9.2, but it will
probably still be a while. If we are able to track down some issue, then
we'd bring it up to RedHat and request that they resolve it.

Thanks,
Dave