Re: PG quitting sporadically!!

On Fri, 15 Feb 2008, Phoenix Kiula wrote:

> I am not sure what checkpoint stuff means. But I added that entry, and
> now my log has ONLY this:
>
> LOG: test message did not get through on socket for statistics collector
> LOG: disabling statistics collector for lack of working socket

If you're getting that, as already suggested you should be chasing down
whatever is going on there before you touch anything else. I was throwing
out a list of possible things that might cause your problems on a fully
working system, but you don't have one of those right now and that's
really strange.

Have you ever run top and hit the C key to see what all the processes were
doing? It labels the major PostgreSQL processes more usefully if you do
that. I'd be curious just what is gobbling up resources on your machine,
this socket error is somewhat disturbing.

Since it sounds like a fairly critical machine you've got going here, if I
were you I'd be thinking a bit about whether it might make sense to
purchase an hour or two of consulting time from someone who really knows
this area. You're doing the right thing asking for help here, but I
wonder whether there's something else going on that would be obvious to an
expert if they logged into your system and poked around a bit. (This is
certainly not an ad for me--I'm not doing consulting right now).

> I can do that, but the upgrade process is not very simple or automated
> and will take backup of database and all that rigmarole...Is there an
> easy RPM method of upgrading postgresql without backingup/restoring etc?
> I am on CentOS 4.

First off: I wouldn't want to introduce another variable here until
there's a better understanding of what's wrong with your existing system.
You certainly should do a true backup here oriented at disaster recovery
before upgrading given the weirdness involved. But the upgrade itself
doesn't require one, just installing new packages.

If you've already installed the PGDG RPMs on your system (I don't know how
else you'd have gotten 8.2.3 onto Centos 4 via RPM) you should be able to
download the new ones for the latest 8.2, put them all into a directory,
and do "rpm -Uvh *.rpm" to get the new ones replacing the old (with the
server shutdown!). *Should* only take a few minutes. I wrote a little
guide to sorting through more complicated upgrades if it comes to that you
can find at http://www.westnet.com/~gsmith/content/postgresql/pgrpm.htm ,
but if the packages are from the same underlying source it's unlikely
you'll have that large of a mess.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD