Re: Hungry postmaster

"Ilja Golshtein" <ilejn(at)yandex(dot)ru> writes:
> At the moment on my Linux box I have process
> 'postmaster' eats all CPU. It corresponds
> with connection closed day before -
> not sure if it was normal disconnect.
> strace shows the process constantly
> makes 'send' syscall with EPIPE result.
> Any ideas how to trace this issue
> and/or prevent such thing in the future?

Send it a SIGINT and see if it goes away.

If so, I would bet that someone did an unconstrained join (ie SELECT
the cross product of some large tables) and killed their client instead
of waiting for the result. It's not hard to write a SQL query that will
produce terabytes of output :-(

If SIGINT doesn't kill it pretty quickly, try attaching to it with gdb
so you can get a stack trace.

regards, tom lane