7.3.2 closing connections, sometimes - Mailing list pgsql-general

From felix@crowfix.com
Subject 7.3.2 closing connections, sometimes
Date
Msg-id 20050706181901.GA8502@crowfix.com
Whole thread Raw
Responses Re: 7.3.2 closing connections, sometimes
List pgsql-general
I hate to post as vague a description as this, but I don't think the
devil is in the details this time.  I may be wrong ...

This project is running 7.3.2 on a RedHat 9 system.  We plan to
upgrade in a few weeks to Fedora Core and Postgres 8, so maybe this
problem is not worth wasting too much time on, right now.

This is a SOAP server, Apache with mod_perl, connecting to Postgres
via DBI/DBD::Pg.  Sometimes it gets in a mood, for want of a better
term, where a specific SQL statement fails with the good ole message
"server closed the connection unexpectedly".  It will fail like this
for several hours, then suddenly start working again.  The SQL that it
fails on works perfectly in psql; it always returns the exact data
expected.  It's a small table of perhaps a dozen lines, and does not
change very often.  I would suspect hardware except that a new machine
behaves just the same.

One of the puzzles is that nothing shows up in the log.  The log is
configured thusly:

    server_min_messages = notice
    client_min_messages = notice
    log_min_error_statement = error

And yet only the only messages that show up are start and stop.  I
changed log_min_error_statement to notice like the others, and it
hasn't failed since, but I doubt this is the cause, because it has
gone thru these mood swings before without having changed the log
level.  It's not the soap server disconnecting from the SOAP client,
because the server continues to log things.

Did 7.3.2 have any problems that might cause random disconnects, or
diconnects for some obscure but documented reason?  Google found some,
but none of them apply here, as far as I can tell.

Or are there useful changes to logging that might track this down?
Strace generated about 50MB of log file, too much for me!

--
            ... _._. ._ ._. . _._. ._. ___ .__ ._. . .__. ._ .. ._.
     Felix Finch: scarecrow repairman & rocket surgeon / felix@crowfix.com
  GPG = E987 4493 C860 246C 3B1E  6477 7838 76E9 182E 8151 ITAR license #4933
I've found a solution to Fermat's Last Theorem but I see I've run out of room o

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