Re: Backend often crashing

On Thu, 20 Feb 2003, Jeff Ross wrote:

> On Thu, 20 Feb 2003, Guido Notari wrote:
>
> > I have one of those nasty problems, with Postgres backend often crashing
> > with signal 11.
> >
> [snip]
>
> > Any hints are welcome.
> >
> > ciao
> > Guido
> >
> I think signal 11 is almost always bad ram. If you do a Google search,
> you'll see what I mean.
>
> If this is recent, maybe the ram just went bad.

My first thought until the statements about the second machine doing it as
well.

Have you considered the possibility that you are running into some sort of
resource limit? It could be your machines have a hard memory usage limit (they
are production machines after all). I don't think PostgreSQL would just die on
a Sig11 for that. It should log messages about memory allocation
failure. However, if your kernel is configured to do 'lazy' allocation it could
be that it's only when the memory comes to be used that the fault
happens. (Should that be a bus fault not a segmentation one though?)

--
Nigel J. Andrews