Greg Smith <greg@2ndquadrant.com> writes:
> Scott Marlowe wrote:
>> I tested 8.4 what I thought was fairly hardly last year only
>> to have 8.4.1 die under the same load that 8.3 handled without a
>> problem, and reverted to the known working version putting testing
>> 8.4.1 on hold.
> FYI, since December of 2009 (release of 8.4.2) there have been 10 bugs
> fixed with the word "crash" in their description, as well as 7 memory
> leaks that could potentially lead to crash. Even six months ago I was
> still hesitant to push 8.4 toward production systems; the number of bugs
> shaken out in the last two releases has been substantial.
Are we reading the same CVS log? I find quite a few commit messages
mentioning the word "crash", but the *only* post-8.4.0 crash fix that
applied to 8.4 and didn't also get committed into 8.3 (and often a
lot further back than that) was this, which made it into 8.4.2:
2009-09-22 11:46 tgl
* src/: backend/catalog/dependency.c,
test/regress/expected/rules.out, test/regress/sql/rules.sql
(REL8_4_STABLE), backend/catalog/dependency.c,
test/regress/expected/rules.out, test/regress/sql/rules.sql: Fix
crash if a DROP is attempted on an internally-dependent object.
Introduced in 8.4 rewrite of dependency.c. Per bug #5072 from Amit
Khandekar.
I searched the CVS log in detail back to the start of 2010, and found
only half a dozen patches of any flavor that were applied to 8.4 but not
8.3 (discounting cosmetic changes such as docs-only patches). Only one
of these was a server crash condition, and most of them applied to
new-in-8.4 features that you wouldn't even exercise if you were simply
migrating an 8.3-compatible application.
So in general I think there is no objective evidence to support a
position that 8.4 is less stable than 8.3, at least not since about
8.4.2. This is fairly typical of our release series, IME. I expect
9.0 will have a much longer period before its bug curve falls to match
the previous releases, of course.
I'm curious to get to the bottom of Scott's report. It's possible that
he hit one of the two or three 8.4-only crashes we fixed since 8.4.1;
or the bug may still be lurking.
regards, tom lane
