Re: what could cause postgres to crash?

On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 8:16 PM, Sandeep Gupta <gupta(dot)sandeep(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> My postgres sessions, after being idle for 5 --6 hrs, crash on their own.
> Sometimes with error messages sometimes without. The message I get appended
> below. I was looking for suggestion to narrow down as to what could have
> caused this problem. System log doesn't show anything.

Just in case you don't know. PostgreSQL itself NEVER issues a kill -9
to a backend, and a crashing backend will show as a sig 11 not 9.

While it's possible that, as Tom suggested, it's the OOM killer, it's
also possible somebody got too smart and wrote a script to kill idle
connections and used kill -9 instead of kill or kill -15 (default on
linux for kill is -15).

kill -9, much like a regular backend crash or panic, is bad because it
causes all back ends to restart. This can kill server performance if
it happens much.