Re: initdb problem

Joe Barwell <jbar(at)es(dot)co(dot)nz> writes:
> acorn$ sysctl -a | grep shm
> kern.sysv.shmmax: 4194304
> kern.sysv.shmmin: 1
> kern.sysv.shmmni: 32
> kern.sysv.shmseg: 8
> kern.sysv.shmall: 1024

OK, so you should be able to do 4MB without problems.

> acorn$ sudo ipcs -a
> Password:
> sudo: ipcs: command not found

>> Also, which OSX release is this again?

> 10.3.9 on a g4.

Ugh. I don't recall exactly when Apple got around to including ipcs,
but I guess it wasn't in 10.3.9. Your problem is that you're flying
blind because you cannot tell what's going on in shared memory.

What I suspect is that there's an unused shared memory segment sitting
there (perhaps left over from a failed initdb) and eating a sufficiently
large fraction of SHMALL that there's no room for another. If correct,
then rebooting should make it go away and let you initdb. Since you
haven't got ipcrm either, there's basically no other way to get rid of
an unwanted shmem segment :-(

You should think about upgrading to 10.4.x btw --- for Postgres admin
purposes, having ipcs and ipcrm available is alone worth the price of
admission. And it does seem they've improved the OS's performance in
various ways too.

regards, tom lane