Re: help getting a backtrace from 9.2 on Ubuntu 13.04?

On Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 7:49 PM, Jeff Janes <jeff(dot)janes(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 10:37 AM, Chris Curvey <ccurvey(at)zuckergoldberg(dot)com
> > wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Great thought. Looking through the logs, it appears that all my failures
>> are on a CREATE INDEX. Usually on my biggest table, but often on another
>> table.
>>
>>
>>
>> 2013-09-10 10:09:46 EDT ERROR: canceling autovacuum task
>>
>> 2013-09-10 10:09:46 EDT CONTEXT: automatic analyze of table
>> "certified_mail_ccc2.public.cm_status_history"
>>
>> 2013-09-10 10:15:13 EDT LOG: server process (PID 14386) was terminated
>> by signal 11: Segmentation fault
>>
>> 2013-09-10 10:15:13 EDT DETAIL: Failed process was running: CREATE INDEX
>> cm_envelope_tracking_number ON cm_envelope USING btree (tracking_number);
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> 2013-09-10 10:15:13 EDT LOG: terminating any other active server
>> processes
>>
>> 2013-09-10 10:15:13 EDT WARNING: terminating connection because of crash
>> of another server process
>>
>> 2013-09-10 10:15:13 EDT 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.
>>
>>
>>
>> I cannot square this with the fact that when I echo the commands, the
>> last echoed command is about setting privileges.
>>
>
> A backend is crashing, and taking down the entire PostgreSQL system. The
> commands you see being echoed are from a different process from the one
> that triggered the crash, so it is just an innocent bystander which has no
> useful information. Are you using parallel restore? (If not, why is there
> someone indexing your biggest table during the restore?)
>

I'm the only person doing anything, and the only thing going on is the
restore. And I'm not using parallel restore (I thought that might be part
of the issue.)

>
> You will want to get the backtrace of the coredump generated by the
> crashed backend, not of the running process. Have you tried taking a bt
> with gdb? You said you couldn't find the symbols, but have you tried it
> anyway? On CentOS and openSuse I often get warnings about some symbols not
> being found, but all the symbols I actually need to interpret the backtrace
> end up being there.
>

I can try, but the instructions said that installing the -dev package by
itself was not sufficient, so I stopped at that point. But as they say in
the lottery ads, "Hey, you never know!"

> Cheers,
>
> Jeff
>

Many thanks!