Background writer process terminating

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I have a server running 8.0.1 which keeps terminating. I first noticed this
today: it has happened about 7 times already. Periodically, the background
writer process is killed and drags the rest of the server down with it.
Most times PG restarts on its own, but twice I've found a dead server on
the floor and had to resusciate it manually with pg_ctl start. Here's a log
snippet:

<2005-03-28 12:28:27 EST >LOG: background writer process (PID 17409) was terminated by signal 9
<2005-03-28 12:28:27 EST >LOG: terminating any other active server processes
<2005-03-28 12:28:27 EST >LOG: all server processes terminated; reinitializing
<2005-03-28 12:28:27 EST >LOG: database system was interrupted at 2005-03-28 12:27:49 EST
<2005-03-28 12:28:41 EST >LOG: startup process (PID 17452) was terminated by signal 9
<2005-03-28 12:28:41 EST >LOG: aborting startup due to startup process failure

I bumped the logging way up and caught it happening again. The logs are too big
to reproduce here, but can be found at:

http://www.gtsm.com/pgboom3.txt

Memory seems to be ok. No entries in /var/log/messages (this is a Linux
2.4 series kernel, gcc 3.4.1, dual 686 CPU, 1 SCSI drive system). There
are two other 8.01 servers running on this box: they are also experiencing
this problem, but only once each so far. There was a recent problem with
running out of filehandles, but this was boosted and is probably not an
issue now. Plenty of disk space on the partitions. Suggestions and hints
very welcome.

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane greg(at)turnstep(dot)com
PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 200503281839
http://biglumber.com/x/web?pk=2529DF6AB8F79407E94445B4BC9B906714964AC8

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