Re: PG Seg Faults Performing a Query

Bill Thoen <bthoen(at)gisnet(dot)com> writes:
> My PostgreSQL is working great for small SQL queries even from my large
> table (18 million records). But when I ask it to retrieve anything that
> takes it more than 10 minutes to assemble, it crashes with this
> "Segmentation Fault" error. I get so little feedback and I'm still pretty
> unfamiliar with Postgresql that I don't even know where to begin.

Running the client under gdb and getting a stack trace would be a good
place to begin.

FWIW, when I deliberately try to read a query result that's too large
for client memory, I get reasonable behavior:

regression=# select x, y, repeat('xyzzy',200) from generate_series(1,10000) x, generate_series(1,100) y;
out of memory for query result
regression=#

If you're seeing a segfault in psql then it sounds like a PG bug. If
you're seeing a segfault in a homebrew program then I wonder whether
it's properly checking for an error return from libpq ...

regards, tom lane