postmaster in a tight loop - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

Folks,

I encountered a situation on Sunday night where the postmaster was in  
a tight
loop.  That's the conclusion we reached, but have no real proof.  I  
also have no
idea how to reproduce this situation.  This post is just an FYI in  
case it helps.

The laptop was running hot so I looked around and found pgsql to be  
the cause.
I decided to shutdown the postmaster, but it would not shutdown:

# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/postgresql stop
pg_ctl: server does not shut down

After that, I started looking closer.

For starters, here is what the system looked like:

$ date
Sun Feb 10 19:38:10 EST 2008


$ ps auwx | grep pgsql
pgsql       1172 90.0  0.4 44636  3088  ??  Rs   10:45AM  21:55.16 / 
usr/local/bin/postgres -D /usr/local/pgsql/data
pgsql       1183  0.0  0.4 44652  3392  ??  Ss   10:45AM   0:06.77  
postgres: writer process    (postgres)
pgsql       1184  0.0  0.4 44652  3176  ??  Ss   10:45AM   0:04.42  
postgres: wal writer process    (postgres)
pgsql       1185  0.0  0.4 44884  3336  ??  Ss   10:45AM   0:03.35  
postgres: autovacuum launcher process    (postgres)
pgsql       1186  0.0  0.4  8588  3060  ??  Ss   10:45AM   0:03.77  
postgres: stats collector process    (postgres)

A little bit from top:

last pid: 89359;  load averages:  3.10,  2.84,   
2.30                                                                   
up 0+08:53:20  19:37:54
84 processes:  5 running, 79 sleeping
CPU states: 48.3% user,  0.8% nice, 50.8% system,  0.0% interrupt,   
0.0% idle
Mem: 306M Active, 235M Inact, 104M Wired, 27M Cache, 85M Buf, 68M Free
Swap: 512M Total, 512M Free
  PID USERNAME    THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU  
COMMAND 1172 pgsql         1 130    0 44636K  3088K RUN     22:18 77.34%  
postgres 1387 root          1 100    0 85936K 62032K RUN     10:48  4.49% Xorg
89357 dan           1   8    0  1860K  1424K wait     0:00  1.00% sh
46507 dan           1  96    0 15636K  9900K select   1:52  0.05%  
npviewer.bin
88563 dan           1  96    0 28856K 21128K RUN      0:01  0.05%  
kdeinit

$ uname -a
FreeBSD laptop.unixathome.org 6.3-PRERELEASE FreeBSD 6.3-PRERELEASE  
#2: Wed Nov  7 10:54:48 EST 2007     root@pcbsd:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/ 
PCBSD  i386

Running PostgreSQL 8.3.0

Looking at ktrace output, I saw a lot of this:

1172 postgres CALL  kse_release(0xbfbfd500)
1172 postgres RET   kse_release -1 errno 22 Invalid argument

The ldd output for postgres is:

[dan@laptop:/usr/home/dan] $ ldd /usr/local/bin/postgres
/usr/local/bin/postgres:        libintl.so.8 => /usr/local/lib/libintl.so.8 (0x2835a000)        libxml2.so.5 =>
/usr/local/lib/libxml2.so.5(0x28363000)        libssl.so.4 => /usr/lib/libssl.so.4 (0x2846f000)        libcrypto.so.4
=>/lib/libcrypto.so.4 (0x2849d000)        libcrypt.so.3 => /lib/libcrypt.so.3 (0x28590000)        libm.so.4 =>
/lib/libm.so.4(0x285a8000)        libpthread.so.2 => /lib/libpthread.so.2 (0x285be000)        libc.so.6 =>
/lib/libc.so.6(0x285e3000)        libiconv.so.3 => /usr/local/lib/libiconv.so.3 (0x286c9000)        libz.so.3 =>
/lib/libz.so.3(0x287b6000)
 
[dan@laptop:/usr/home/dan] $

The server was compiled with these options:

[dan@laptop:~] $ less /var/db/ports/postgresql83/options
# This file is auto-generated by 'make config'.
# No user-servicable parts inside!
# Options for postgresql-client-8.3.0
_OPTIONS_READ=postgresql-client-8.3.0
WITH_NLS=true
WITHOUT_PAM=true
WITHOUT_LDAP=true
WITHOUT_MIT_KRB5=true
WITHOUT_HEIMDAL_KRB5=true
WITHOUT_OPTIMIZED_CFLAGS=true
WITH_XML=true
WITH_TZDATA=true
WITHOUT_DEBUG=true
WITHOUT_INTDATE=true
[dan@laptop:~] $



-- 
Dan Langille -- http://www.langille.org/
dan@langille.org