Thread: Seeking advice on how to deal with the dreaded stuck spinlock problem on NT

Does anyone have any advice/suggestions about how to deal with 
stuck spinlock problems while running postgres 6.5.3
on cygwin B20?

Background:

Running on NT with sp6, I'm using active perl with DBI 
and DBD-PG to load data into postgres and update some tables 
every five minutes with a simple batch file that executes my 
perl scripts.  Everything seems to work well for a few hours,
but then the backend dies with the dreaded...      
FATAL: s_lock(14490065) at spin.c:125, stuck spinlock. Aborting.

After this happens, I'm unable to connect to the backend unless I 
kill and restart the ipc-daemon and postmaster again from the cygwin
bash prompt.

I've searched the lists and have seen several references to this problem 
on NT, but found no clear solution.  Good People, do you have any
suggestions
on how to deal with this? 

Dan

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-pgsql-interfaces@postgreSQL.org
> [mailto:owner-pgsql-interfaces@postgreSQL.org]On Behalf Of Dan Rosner
> 
> Does anyone have any advice/suggestions about how to deal with 
> stuck spinlock problems while running postgres 6.5.3
> on cygwin B20?
> 
> Background:
> 
> Running on NT with sp6, I'm using active perl with DBI 
> and DBD-PG to load data into postgres and update some tables 
> every five minutes with a simple batch file that executes my 
> perl scripts.  Everything seems to work well for a few hours,
> but then the backend dies with the dreaded...
>        
> FATAL: s_lock(14490065) at spin.c:125, stuck spinlock. Aborting.
> 
> After this happens, I'm unable to connect to the backend unless I 
> kill and restart the ipc-daemon and postmaster again from the cygwin
> bash prompt.
> 
> I've searched the lists and have seen several references to this problem 
> on NT, but found no clear solution.  Good People, do you have any
> suggestions
> on how to deal with this? 
>

Did you apply the patch to cygipc library ?

Regards.

Hiroshi Inoue
Inoue@tpf.co.jp

Hiroshi Inoue wrote:
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: owner-pgsql-interfaces@postgreSQL.org
> > [mailto:owner-pgsql-interfaces@postgreSQL.org]On Behalf Of Dan Rosner
> >
> > Does anyone have any advice/suggestions about how to deal with
> > stuck spinlock problems while running postgres 6.5.3
> > on cygwin B20?
> >
> 
> Did you apply the patch to cygipc library ?
> 
> Regards.
> 
> Hiroshi Inoue
> Inoue@tpf.co.jp

Thanks for your suggestion.  It leads me to another question.

I built up Postgres 6.5.3 on NT using Kevin Lo's instructions, which 
didn't mention applying the patch you describe to the Cygwin32 IPC 
Package by Ludovic LANGE .  However, I just looked at the Microsoft
NT FAQ on postgresql.org, and now see there is a patch appended to the
end
of the NT installation instructions.  The instructions say to...

3. Apply the patch at the end of this file to the cygipc sources  before compiling the library.

This may be my problem.  I assumed the patch was already in 6.5.3,
though now
I'm not sure how to apply the patch.  Would someone mind telling me the 
command line to use?  It seems I should save the patch to somefile and
then do something like this in the root of the cygipc sources:

patch -p0 < somefile

Is this correct?  Assuming the patch was correctly applied, I would then 
just configure, make and install my binaries again.  And hopefully the 
spinlock problem will go away.  Is this the correct way to apply the
patch?

Dan