Re: System overload / context switching / oom, 8.3

Andy Colson wrote:
> The oom-killer is kicking in, at some point, so somebody is using too
> much ram. There should be messages or logs or something, right?
> (I've never enabled the oom stuff so dont know much about it). But
> the log messages might be helpful.

They probably won't be. The information logged about what the OOM
killer decided to kill is rarely sufficient to tell anything interesting
about the true cause in a PostgreSQL context--only really helpful if
you've got some memory hog process it decided to kill. In this case,
seems to be a simple situation: way too many connections for the
work_mem setting used for a 8GB server to support. I'd take a look at
the system using "top -c" as well, in good times and bad if possible,
just to see if any weird memory use is showing up somewhere, perhaps
even outside the database.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support
greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com www.2ndQuadrant.us