Re: Postgres Crashes

From: Bruce Momjian <pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us>
To: Prem Gopalan <prem(at)mazunetworks(dot)com>
Cc: pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: Postgres Crashes
Date: 2004-05-05 17:01:23
Message-ID: 200405051701.i45H1NC17685@candle.pha.pa.us
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Prem Gopalan wrote:
> We run a multithreaded application that uses postgres 7.4 on Linux
> 2.4.18, dual cpu Xeon processor machine. We have occassional weird
> crashes and have tried a lot of things to reproduce them in house, but
> in vain. We do have coredumps and I have listed the backtraces and
> their common characteristics here.

Whether your client is multi-threaded or not should have no affect on
the postmaster and any crashes you see there.

This part of the backtrace seems significant:

> #3 0x081a767e in elog_finish (elevel=20, fmt=0x8235680 "invalid
> memory alloc request size %lu")

I wonder if you are allocating too much memory. Looking at the 7.4 code
I see these all as ERROR, not FATAL (backend exits) or PANIC (postmaster
exits), so it shouldn't be crashing anything:

./backend/utils/mmgr/mcxt.c: elog(ERROR, "invalid memory
alloc request size %lu",
./backend/utils/mmgr/mcxt.c: elog(ERROR, "invalid memory
alloc request size %lu",
./backend/utils/mmgr/mcxt.c: elog(ERROR, "invalid memory
alloc request size %lu",
./backend/utils/mmgr/mcxt.c: elog(ERROR, "invalid memory
alloc request size %lu",

Would you send over a backtrace that shows more levels above this?

Can you reproduce this crash on demand?

I can't imagine why you would get this error. I wonder if you have a
problem with bad memory on that machine?

--
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