I've very recently experienced a failure of my postgres database which
neither vacuuming nor rebuilding indices cured. This may have been
caused by my being forced to flip the switch - something that's never
happened to me under linux before, and on a machine with a light load
running nothing but postmaster, some postgres connections, a small
selection of admin demons and sshd.
Thereafter vacuum would die processing certain tables, and pg_dump
would fail similarly. Certain simple operations under psql failed
also, e.g. 'select fieldone,fieldtwo from table;'
I'm afraid I simply restored from backups, so I'm not in a position to
speculate on why it might have occurred, since I didn't delve much
further.
However, the message with which postgres crashed was along the lines
of
"backend received a 0x44 while idle" or something like that. This
appears to come from fe-exec.c, i.e. libpq, presumably.
Can anyone tell me what this means in the context? I did look at
source, but my C is non-existent.
I'm keeping a close eye out now, and will obviously post with logs if
the event recurs in the future.
Thanks,
Moray
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Moray.McConnachie@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk