Yesterday one of our clients called up and complained about lousy
performance and being unable to log in to our postgresql 8.0 backed ERP
running on windows 2000 server. The server has been run for several
months without being restarted or rebooted.
The login was hanging in a simple plpgsql login script which basically
did an insert/update on a small table. It would hang when called from
within psql, and once hung the query would not respond to cancel
requests (such as they are implemented on win32). Investigating
further, trying to select form this small table at all would also hang.
Unfortunately, this table tells me which pids are safe to kill and which
are not, so I had no choice to do emergency restart of postgresql
service which went without complaint and everything worked normally,
with nothing extraordinary in the server log.
Not ruling out an obscure win32 problem here but this is fairly
untraceable. This is just a FYI type of post. This particular client
with about 50 users has been running over a year on win32/pg and this is
the first time I had to restart the service :(. I am really pushing a
move to linux although there is no reason to believe this will prevent
this from happening again.
Merlin