Re: Recent SIGSEGV failures in buildfarm HEAD - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Tom Lane
Subject Re: Recent SIGSEGV failures in buildfarm HEAD
Date
Msg-id 21637.1167330960@sss.pgh.pa.us
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Recent SIGSEGV failures in buildfarm HEAD  (Stefan Kaltenbrunner <stefan@kaltenbrunner.cc>)
Responses Re: Recent SIGSEGV failures in buildfarm HEAD
Re: Recent SIGSEGV failures in buildfarm HEAD
List pgsql-hackers
Stefan Kaltenbrunner <stefan@kaltenbrunner.cc> writes:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> Stefan Kaltenbrunner <stefan@kaltenbrunner.cc> writes:
>>> ... Maybe something is causing a dramatic
>>> increase in memory usage that is causing the random failures (in impalas
>>> case the OOM-killer actually decides to terminate the postmaster) ?
>> 
>> No, most all the failures I've looked at are sig11 not sig9.

> hmm - still weird and I would not actually consider impala a resource
> starved box (especially when compared to other buildfarm-members) so
> there seems to be something strange going on.

Actually ... one way that a "memory overconsumption" bug could manifest
as sig11 would be if it's a runaway-recursion issue: usually you get sig11
when the machine's stack size limit is exceeded.  This doesn't put us
any closer to localizing the problem, but at least it's a guess about
the cause?

I wonder whether there's any way to get the buildfarm script to report a
stack trace automatically if it finds a core file left behind in the
$PGDATA directory after running the tests.  Would something like this
be adequately portable?
if [ -f $PGDATA/core* ]then    echo bt | gdb $installdir/bin/postgres $PGDATA/core*fi

Obviously it'd fail if no gdb available, but that seems pretty harmless.
The other thing that we'd likely need is an explicit "ulimit -c
unlimited" for machines where core dumps are off by default.
        regards, tom lane


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