Re: errors with high connections rate

Hi.

-- problem 1 --

I have an application, using libpq, connecting to postgres 9.1.3 (Amazon AMI distro).

The application writes data at a high rate (at this point it's 500 transaction per second), using multiple threads (at this point it's 800).

These are "worker" threads, that receive "messages" that are then written out to the DB. There is no connection pool, instead, each worker thread maintains it's own connection that it uses to write data to the database. The connections are kept pthread's "specific" data blocks.

Hmm. To get that kind of TPS with that design are you running with fsync=off or on storage that claims to flush I/O without actually doing so? Have you checked your crash safety? Is it just fairly big hardware?

Why are you using so many connections? Unless you have truly monstrous hardware your system should achieve considerably greater throughput by reducing the connection count and queueing bursts of writes. You wouldn't even need an external pool in your case, just switch to a producer/consumer model where your accepting threads add work to separate and much fewer writer threads for sending to the DB. Writer threads could then do useful optimisations like multi-value-inserting or COPYing data, doing small batches in transactions, etc.

I'm seriously impressed that your system is working under load at all with 800 concurrent connections fighting to write all at once.

Can't connect to DB: could not send data to server: Transport endpoint is not connected

could not send startup packet: Transport endpoint is not connected

postmaster forking and failing because of operating system resource limits like max proc count, anti-forkbomb measures, max file handles, etc?

-- problem 2 --

As I'm trying to debug this (with strace), I could never reproduce it, at least to see what's going on, but sometimes I get another error : "too many users connected". Even restarting postmaster doesn't help. The postmaster is running with -N810, and the role has connection limit of 1000. Yet, the "too many" error starts creeping up only after 275 connections are opened (counted by successful connect() from strace).

Any idea where should I dig?

See how many connections the *server* thinks exist by examining pg_stat_activity .

Check dmesg and the PostgreSQL server logs to see if you're hitting operating system limits. Look for fork() failures, unexplained segfaults, etc.

--
Craig Ringer