Inexplicably running wild and freezing with 7.0

Julian Coutts (jster(at)cobite(dot)com) reports a bug with a severity of 1
The lower the number the more severe it is.

Short Description
Inexplicably running wild and freezing with 7.0

Long Description
Running on a HP lpr 192RAM 600mz pIII computer.
Running 7.0 (have been a big fan of 6.5.3 which was/is rock solid)
Ran okay for about a week then would randomly do one of several things.

1. used up all the available cpu time and hung in the middle of a query never returning. The postmaster is what would eat up the CPU
2. about 1 time out of 10 would claim that the backend wasn't running and if you were in the DB directly and not using some object to connect to it it would give you "!" prompt and claim that the backend wasn't working. You would then have to quit the app and re-login. You wouldn't need to restart the postmaster and logging back in show no ill signs ... until about 10 queries later.
3. The computer's cpu would get eaten up by the klogd (daemon) and the machine would be slow as hell.
4. Would spawn additonal postmasters that would still be running after killing the one that was eating up the CPU. Very strange.

other notes
-I couldn't dump the db's after we decided to move it back a version.
-this may be unrelated: At one point we decided to restart the machine it was on. The entire DB file disappeared including all DB's. (I had a back up)
-two sys admins and 6 developers couldn't figure out a pattern with the problem. Inconsistent but the problem got worse as time went on.
-Vaccum didn't help.
-Regressing on the same machine to 6.5.3 has been rock solid ever since which kinda rules out a hardware problem.
-unfortunatly it kinda scared my boss who wants to move my db over to ORACLE (uh! so bloated). I think that the 6.5.3 version is restoreing his confidence in it.

Hope this helps you awesome postgres people.

Julian

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