Re: Background writer process terminating

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> Could the situation have been going on longer than just today? How
> far back do your logs go? What, if anything, has changed on the
> system since the last time you're certain this problem wasn't
> happening?

Logs go back to February 22, when 8.0.1 was put in place. No major changes
lately that I can think of. Started today at 3:38 am. There is a nightly
cron job that fires at 3:37 to vacuum and is undoubtably related, but the
others do not seem to correspond to anything in particular (there are always
users hitting the db via web scripts of course).

> Is there any pattern to "periodically"?

Not many data points yet, but here's all the occurances:

$ grep "signal 9" 5810.log
<2005-03-28 03:38:14 EST >LOG: server process (PID 29216) was terminated by signal 9
<2005-03-28 10:15:45 EST >LOG: background writer process (PID 29271) was terminated by signal 9
<2005-03-28 11:05:00 EST >LOG: background writer process (PID 2202) was terminated by signal 9
<2005-03-28 12:22:26 EST >LOG: background writer process (PID 7748) was terminated by signal 9
<2005-03-28 12:27:37 EST >LOG: background writer process (PID 17119) was terminated by signal 9
<2005-03-28 12:27:48 EST >LOG: background writer process (PID 17404) was terminated by signal 9
<2005-03-28 12:28:27 EST >LOG: background writer process (PID 17409) was terminated by signal 9
<2005-03-28 12:28:41 EST >LOG: startup process (PID 17452) was terminated by signal 9
<2005-03-28 13:52:00 EST >LOG: 00000: background writer process (PID 21456) was terminated by signal 9
<2005-03-28 15:26:25 EST 21453>LOG: 00000: background writer process (PID 24526) was terminated by signal 9
<2005-03-28 15:39:16 EST 21453>LOG: 00000: background writer process (PID 655) was terminated by signal 9
<2005-03-28 16:05:02 EST 21453>LOG: 00000: background writer process (PID 1579) was terminated by signal 9
<2005-03-28 16:05:09 EST 21453>LOG: 00000: background writer process (PID 4141) was terminated by signal 9
<2005-03-28 16:15:06 EST 21453>LOG: 00000: background writer process (PID 4159) was terminated by signal 9
<2005-03-28 16:15:20 EST 21453>LOG: 00000: background writer process (PID 5822) was terminated by signal 9

> Any chance you have a "terminate with extreme prejudice" daemon or
> cron job that kills processes meeting certain conditions?

Nope. I've been happily running pg on this server for many years. I'd frankly suspect
the computer before Postgres, however, but a better error message (e.g. pointing
to a corrupt disk or something) would be helpful. The first one was a server process
and not a background writer process, FWIW.

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane greg(at)turnstep(dot)com
PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 200503281939
http://biglumber.com/x/web?pk=2529DF6AB8F79407E94445B4BC9B906714964AC8

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