Re: Having trouble with backups (was: Re: Crash Recovery)

Carlos Moreno wrote:
<snip>
> And the second (and intriguing) problem: whenever I run pg_dump,
> my system *freezes* until pg_dump finishes. When I say "system",
> I mean the software that is running and sending data to the PG
> database. It just freezes, users are unable to connect during
> several minutes, and the ones already connected think the server
> died, so they end up disconnecting after one or two minutes
> seeing that the server does not respond.

Is there any chance that you have hardware problems? For example a
couple of disk areas that are defective and the system is not happy
about, or maybe hard drive controller problems?

With PC's, this sort of thing generally seems to mean hardware problems
of some sort that are being triggered by PostgreSQL having to run
through the entire dataset. Could be caused by I/O load, could be
caused by hard drive errors, etc.

?

> Is this normal?

No.

Out of curiosity, which operating system are you using?

:-(

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

> Is there any way to avoid it? (I guess if I
> have a solution to the first problem -- i.e., doing incremental
> backups -- then that would solve this one, since it would only
> "freeze" the system for a few seconds, which wouldn't be that
> bad...)
>
> Thanks for any comments!
>
> Carlos
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