postmaster dies (6.5.3)

Hi,

I got seriuos problem this night with postgres which is running as
db backend to apache. I have cron job which vacuuming database
every hour and it worked for weeks without problem
(well, there is problem with concurrent processes under high load,
but this night was very quiet)

Here is the processes currently seen:

167 ? S 0:00 /usr/local/pgsql/bin/postgres localhost httpd nature idle
168 ? S 0:00 /usr/local/pgsql/bin/postgres localhost httpd nature idle
169 ? S 0:00 /usr/local/pgsql/bin/postgres localhost httpd nature idle
170 ? S 0:00 /usr/local/pgsql/bin/postgres localhost httpd nature idle
171 ? S 0:00 /usr/local/pgsql/bin/postgres localhost httpd nature idle
26578 ? S 0:00 /usr/local/pgsql/bin/postgres localhost httpd nature idle
29372 ? S 0:00 /usr/local/pgsql/bin/postgres localhost httpd discovery idle

from apache's error log:
[Wed Dec 15 02:10:08 1999] [error] DBI->connect failed: connectDB() -- couldn't
send startup packet: errno=32
Broken pipe
at /opt/perl5/lib/site_perl/5.005/Apache/DBI.pm line 138

[Wed Dec 15 02:10:08 1999] [error] DBI->connect failed: pqReadData() -- backend
closed the channel unexpectedly.
This probably means the backend terminated abnormally
before or while processing the request.
at /opt/perl5/lib/site_perl/5.005/Apache/DBI.pm line 138

[Wed Dec 15 02:10:43 1999] [error] DBI->connect failed: connectDB() -- connect()
failed: No such file or directory
Is the postmaster running at 'localhost' and accepting connections on Unix socke
t '5432'?
at /opt/perl5/lib/site_perl/5.005/Apache/DBI.pm line 138

fortunately postmaster was started with debug option:

StartTransactionCommand
query: SET client_encoding = 'KOI8'
ProcessUtility: SET client_encoding = 'KOI8'
CommitTransactionCommand
postmaster: StreamConnection: accept: Invalid argument
/usr/local/pgsql/bin/postmaster: ServerLoop: handling reading 6
/usr/local/pgsql/bin/postmaster: ServerLoop: handling reading 6
FATAL 1: ReleaseLruFile: No opened files - no one can be closed
proc_exit(0) [#0]
shmem_exit(0) [#0]
exit(0)

Aha,

>From system log files I found probable explanation - file table overflow !
Could this be a reason of postmaster dead and how to avoid this ?

Dec 15 01:47:27 zeus kernel: Unable to load interpreter
Dec 15 02:09:28 zeus xntpd[103]: kernel pll status change 89
Dec 15 02:10:08 zeus squid[133]: file_open: error opening file /d4/squid/cache/0
2/69/00001692: (23) File table overflow
Dec 15 02:10:08 zeus squid[133]: storeSwapInStart: Failed for 'http://xyz.tvcom.
ru/99/12/100_2.jpg'
Dec 15 02:10:12 zeus kernel: Unable to load interpreter
Dec 15 03:26:16 zeus xntpd[103]: kernel pll status change 89

Regards,

Oleg
_____________________________________________________________
Oleg Bartunov, sci.researcher, hostmaster of AstroNet,
Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow University (Russia)
Internet: oleg(at)sai(dot)msu(dot)su, http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/
phone: +007(095)939-16-83, +007(095)939-23-83