Re: Debugging guidance

On Fri, 25 Oct 2002, Rich Garabedian wrote:

> Hello All,
>
> I've inherited a fairly complex database that makes heavy use of plpgsql.
> Recently, this database has been crashing at random times when it tries to
> execute a specific plpgsql function. I have lots of print statements
> sprinkled throughout the plpgsq function and the crash seems to happen at
> random places for no apparent reason. According to my print statements, the
> crash sometimes occurs when the function has succesfully exited! So it may
> not be related to the function at all. Because of this apparent randomness,
> I can not reliably duplicate the crash.
>
> I'm very new to postgreSQL, and I'm not much of database guru either. Can
> anyone suggest further debugging avenues?

Well, make sure that you've got your ulimit set to allow core files and
then you should have a core in the database directory which you can
use to get a backtrace from gdb. If you don't get anything, you may need
to compile with debugging and provoke the error again.