Re: How to cripple a postgres server

Stephen Robert Norris  writes:
> I've already strace'ed the idle backend, and I can see the SIGUSR2 being
> delivered just before everything goes bad.

Yes, but what happens after that?

If you don't see anything obvious by examining a single process, maybe
strace'ing the postmaster + all descendant processes would offer a
better viewpoint.

> What resource would you think idle backends might be exhausting?

Difficult to say.  I suspect your normal load doesn't have *all* the
backends trying to run queries at once.  But in any case the SIGUSR2
event should only produce a momentary spike in load, AFAICS.  

			regards, tom lane