Colin Stagner <cbs228@earthlink.net> writes:
> At random intervals that seem to vary by database uptime and usage, a
> COPY [table] FROM [file] statement involving maybe 20k - 80k rows
> (larger amounts of data than I usually work with, but nothing the
> server shouldn't be able to handle) will crash the machine. The screen
> freezes, except for the mouse which freezes after about 30 seconds, and
> the machine doesn't respond to keyboard or mouse input. Attempts to SSH
> into the machine fail-- its not just the GUI locking up. The machine
> must be cold-booted with the reset button.
As an unprivileged process, Postgres *cannot* crash the machine --- at
least not on sanely-written operating systems, and OS X qualifies. A
system-wide lockup is either a hardware fault or a kernel bug.
My money is on an intermittent hardware problem.
regards, tom lane