Re: Total crash of my db-server

Hi Henrik,

--On Montag, 16. Dezember 2002 13:40 +0100 Henrik Steffen
<steffen(at)city-map(dot)de> wrote:

> Dear Justin,
>
> I am not sure whether it's really a hardware problem,
> because I have had similar problems with different machines
> and different os- and pgsql-versions before... If you
> browse the archive you will find postings from me about
> crashes and problems the last 2-3 years...
>
> I can only tell, that the mysql-servers we are running
> have never had similar trouble - and they are run on identical
> hardware and os-types under almost identical load.
>
> Currently, I am running postgres 7.3 on a Redhat Linux
> (Kernel 2.4.19). Most important software packages are
> always up2date.

The situation is, there are many many people out there who use
this RDBMS with big or even large databases. In our case we
are on about 18gig.

If the DB would crash (which it does not in our case) I'd
eventually blame the DB software. If the OS crashes, I'd
for sure blame the OS or the hardware. Whatever the software
does - it can not crash the system unless its running in
kernel space. Postgresql is not a hardware accessing driver.

I't might be that postgresql can trigger problematic details in
your setup (use large memory areas, depends on task switching,
and signal handling) but even then, the setup is problematic,
not postgresql.

Regards
Tino