Re: Server crash on cancelling expensive query.

On Jun 14, 2006, at 3:12 PM, Larry Wissink wrote:
> A developer at my company was running some queries that shouldn't
> have been run because they selected from a very large table and
> ordered by an unindexed field. The odd thing is that when the
> developer cancelled the query the whole server rebooted. (Not just
> the postgres process, the whole server!) It seems that the
> cancellation rather than the query itself caused the reboot. It
> seems like running a big query with a where clause or order by on
> fields that are not indexed and
>
> then cancelling the query after say minutes of running causes the
> server to crash and reboot. It happened several times this week
> already on several occasions. This seems not quite right.

That's not an application problem. That's a kernel bug or a hardware
failure. I'm putting money on bad hardware.

Anything interesting in the system logs? Do you have backups?

Cheers,
Steve