Re: Unpredictable signal 11 crashes on Mac OS X (SOLVED[?])

On Wednesday, October 8, 2003, at 03:54 PM, Tom Lane wrote:

> Gareth Boden <gareth(dot)boden(at)egsgroup(dot)com> writes:
>> We've been having a lot of problems with unpredicatable crashes with
>> 7.3.4 on OS X Server (10.2.6 and 10.2.8 exhibit the same behaviour).
>
> Have you looked into the possibility of bad hardware? I routinely test
> PG on OS X (10.2.6 currently) and have never noticed any instability.

This is probably now solved. Time will tell, since the crashes were
unpredictable to start with.

Bizarrely, it came down to an infinite recursion in a plpgsql function
we were using which exhausted memory and crashed the db server. Is
there any way of limiting stack depth/having some sort of monitor on
these functions to prevent this behaviour in future? Intuitively it
seems to me that dodgy plpgsql functions should not be able to crash
the database server (unlike dodgy C functions, say!).

The offending function was not reported in the logs on Mac OS X for
some reason but only when we compiled a new version on an x86 linux box
(with --enable-debug --enable-cassert, admittedly).

Thanks for listening!
Gareth