[this is getting off topic]
On Thu, 2009-07-30 at 13:44 +0200, Craig Ringer wrote:
> A host with a runaway process hogging memory shouldn't be dying. It
> should really be killing off the problem process, or the problem process
> should be dying its self after failing to allocate requested memory. If
> this isn't the case, YOU HAVE TOO MUCH SWAP.
>
> After all, swap is useless if there's so much that using it brings the
> system to a halt.
In theory you're right, in practice I can't control any of this - it's
the client boxes, I control the DB. The most I can do about it is to
friendly ask the colleagues in charge with that to make sure it won't
happen again, and then still there will be cases like a virtual machine
just crashing.
> > I will probably have to check out now the network connection
> > parameters in the postgres configuration, never had a look at them
> > before... in any case >2 hours mentioned in an earlier post seems a bad
> > default to me.
>
> It's the OS's default. PostgreSQL just doesn't change it.
Well, then looks like I will have to learn a bit about TCP keep-alive
and how linux handles it...
Cheers,
Csaba.