Re: what could cause postgres to crash?

Dear Scott,

Thanks for the input. I doubt that the system has any scripts to kill idle
connections but I would double check that. There are two difficulty in
tracing
and fixing this: 1) The crash is predictable and 2) Can find any killed in
the kernel log files.

There are few materials on the net which tell how to fix this problem. But
first would be good to confirm that it is OOM and, if not, then what
exactly is causing this to happen.

-Sandeep

On Sat, Nov 9, 2013 at 10:46 AM, Scott Marlowe <scott(dot)marlowe(at)gmail(dot)com>wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 8:16 PM, Sandeep Gupta <gupta(dot)sandeep(at)gmail(dot)com>
> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > My postgres sessions, after being idle for 5 --6 hrs, crash on their
> own.
> > Sometimes with error messages sometimes without. The message I get
> appended
> > below. I was looking for suggestion to narrow down as to what could have
> > caused this problem. System log doesn't show anything.
>
> Just in case you don't know. PostgreSQL itself NEVER issues a kill -9
> to a backend, and a crashing backend will show as a sig 11 not 9.
>
> While it's possible that, as Tom suggested, it's the OOM killer, it's
> also possible somebody got too smart and wrote a script to kill idle
> connections and used kill -9 instead of kill or kill -15 (default on
> linux for kill is -15).
>
> kill -9, much like a regular backend crash or panic, is bad because it
> causes all back ends to restart. This can kill server performance if
> it happens much.
>