FATAL 1

newsreader@mediaone.net writes:

I found a couple of entries in my dmesg which stated that linux
(kernel 2.4) killed two postmasters because the system ran out of
memory.

I think that postmaster should log such instances as FATAL 1.

IIRC, the kernel sends a SIGKILL signal in that case, so the affected
application doesn't have a chance to react, it just gets terminated
immediately. If you want to monitor these events better you need to ask
your kernel for help. If the postmaster gets terminated normally, for
various definitions of normal, you will get log entries.

Does anyone know how I can recover these time stamps? If not is there
a log level for which time stamps will be made?

You can turn on time stamps in the postgresql.conf file, but that won't
help you in this case.

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e@gmx.net http://funkturm.homeip.net/~peter

On Fri, Aug 10, 2001 at 12:42:33AM +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote:

newsreader@mediaone.net writes:

I think that postmaster should log such instances as FATAL 1.

IIRC, the kernel sends a SIGKILL signal in that case, so the affected
application doesn't have a chance to react, it just gets terminated
immediately. If you want to monitor these events better you need to ask

Ok here is what I find in dmesg

------------
Out of Memory: Killed process 17534 (postmaster).
Out of Memory: Killed process 18228 (postmaster)
-----------

I think backends got killed instead of postmaster
Fact is postmaster did not die; it is still
running now and apparently survived the
out of memory event

On Thu, Aug 09, 2001 at 11:19:14PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:

newsreader@mediaone.net writes:

I think backends got killed instead of postmaster

Assuming that it was a backend that got killed, the postmaster should
certainly have seen and logged that event. What are you doing with
the postmaster log?

pg 7.1.2.

kernel 2.4.4

I have the log. But they don't make
any sense to me.

I deliberately kill a backend
on my development box and notice
that FATAL 1 entry in the log
So I did

$ grep 'FATAL 1' log

and get a number of entries
but it is not very informative

I start my postmaster like

$ /usr/local/pg7.1/bin/pg_ctl -o "-F -i -h 192.168.0.1" start -l log

and I did not particularly adjusted the debug/log level
Only default...

Thanks

kz

After carefull looking at the pg log
I don't think any of FATAL 1 entries
do not coincide with those in
dmesg

But I am not sure

Tom Lane writes:

Probably. If your *postmaster* is running out of memory then you have
some serious problems. (But: we have had memory-leak problems in the
past in certain authentication paths. What PG version are you running,
anyway?)

I think the behaviour is that if the system as a whole runs out of memory
(physical + swap or whatever) the kernel randomly kills processes to make
room. So a disappearing postmaster is not necessarily a sign of a fault
on PostgreSQL's part. I'm not sure how to configure the kernel in this
area, I just recall the discussion on the kernel mailing list about
whether the init process would be allowed to be randomly killed as well.
(I kid you not.)

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e@gmx.net http://funkturm.homeip.net/~peter