Re: Server error

On Wed, 7 May 2003, Erik Ronström wrote:

> Hi again,
>
> thanks for the answers.
>
> --- Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> > "scott.marlowe" <scott(dot)marlowe(at)ihs(dot)com> writes:
> > > Sig 11 means you have bad memory or CPU, about 99.9% of the time.
> >
> > In my part of the universe, about 99% of the time it means you've
> > found a software bug ;-) ... especially if you can create an example
> > case that is reproducible on another machine. Erik, can you wrap up
> > a test case?
>
> 99% + 99.9%, that makes 198.9 percent :-)

That's because Postgresql goes to 11. :-)

> Unfortunatly, the function depends heavily on the database structure. I
> tried to extract the essential parts to reproduce the problem within a
> small test DB, but then everything worked just fine! But I will post an
> example when I get one...

It could easily be that some data structure has to get to a certain size
before it clobbers some pointers somewhere. Or that the single bad bit of
memory in both machines isn't used until load gets high enough for it to
get allocated for a postgresql backend process.

> > And which PG version are you running, anyway?
>
> 7.2.1. I've heard it has some bugs, but the guy running the server
> refuses to upgrade to _anything_ that isn't cleared by Debian. 7.3
> should have been cleared some days ago, but it hasn't, don't know why.

Hasn't debian approved 7.2.4 yet? With the known bugs in 7.2.1 your
friend is being a bit pedantic if he won't at least upgrade to the latest
version of 7.2. I'd surely trust the opinion of the postgresql developers
over that of the debian developers on which versions of postgresql have
bugs you should be worried about.