Re: Quite strange crash

Denis Perchine <dyp(at)perchine(dot)com> writes:
>>>>>>> FATAL: s_lock(401f7435) at bufmgr.c:2350, stuck spinlock. Aborting.
>>>>>
>>>>> Were there any errors before that?

> Actually you can have a look on the logs yourself.

Well, I found a smoking gun:

Jan 7 04:27:51 mx postgres[2501]: FATAL 1: The system is shutting down

PID 2501 had been running:

Jan 7 04:25:44 mx postgres[2501]: query: vacuum verbose lazy;

What seems to have happened is that 2501 curled up and died, leaving
one or more buffer spinlocks locked. Roughly one spinlock timeout
later, at 04:29:07, we have 1008 complaining of a stuck spinlock.
So that fits.

The real question is what happened to 2501? None of the other backends
reported a SIGTERM signal, so the signal did not come from the
postmaster.

Another interesting datapoint: there is a second place in this logfile
where one single backend reports SIGTERM while its brethren keep running:

Jan 7 04:30:47 mx postgres[4269]: query: vacuum verbose;
...
Jan 7 04:38:16 mx postgres[4269]: FATAL 1: The system is shutting down

There is something pretty fishy about this. You aren't by any chance
running the postmaster under a ulimit setting that might cut off
individual backends after a certain amount of CPU time, are you?
What signal does a ulimit violation deliver on your machine, anyway?

regards, tom lane