RE: Postgresql 7.0 JDBC exceptions - broken connecti ons ?

Sorry for the delay - 3 day weekend here in the UK ;-)

As usual when replying from here, replies prefixed with PM:

--
Peter Mount
Enterprise Support
Maidstone Borough Council
Any views stated are my own, and not those of Maidstone Borough Council.

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Lane [mailto:tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us]
Sent: Friday, May 26, 2000 4:13 PM
To: Peter Mount
Cc: 'Gunnar R|nning'; pgsql-interfaces(at)postgresql(dot)org; PostgreSQL
Developers List (E-mail)
Subject: Re: [INTERFACES] Postgresql 7.0 JDBC exceptions - broken
connections ?

Peter Mount <petermount(at)it(dot)maidstone(dot)gov(dot)uk> writes:
> Unknown Response Type u

> PM: Does anyone [on Hackers] know what the u code is for? The fact it's
> in lower case tells me that the protocol/connection got broken somehow.

There is no 'u' message code. Looks to me like the client got out of
sync with the backend and is trying to interpret data as the start of
a message.

I think that this and the "Tuple received before MetaData" issue could
have a common cause, namely running out of memory on the client side
and not recovering well. libpq is known to emit its equivalent of
"Tuple received before MetaData" when the backend hasn't violated the
protocol at all. What happens is that libpq runs out of memory while
trying to accumulate a large query result, "recovers" by resetting
itself to no-query-active state, and then is surprised when the next
message is another tuple. (Obviously this error recovery plan needs
work, but no one's got round to it yet.) I wonder whether the JDBC
driver has a similar problem, and whether these queries could have
been retrieving enough data to trigger it?

PM: The protocol side of the JDBC driver was based on libpq, so it is
possible that this sort of problem could manifest itself in JDBC.

Another possibility is that the client app is failing to release
query results when done with them, which would eventually lead to
an out-of-memory condition even with not-so-large queries.

PM: Garbage collection can be strange (and different on each platform).
Unfortunately you can't guarantee that garbage collection will occur
regularly (or when the VM's memory fills - normally 16Mb), or that it will
run at all.

regards, tom lane