Tom Lane conjured forth the following characters:
>
> > Might want to turn off dumping of core files; I believe man ulimit is
> > the place to look.
>
> Actually, as a developer I would've first wanted to look into the core
> files and try to see why they showed up in the first place. A gdb stack
> trace would often tell something useful (... if not to you, then to
> someone on the -hackers list ...). Cleaning up after a problem is fine,
> but don't destroy the evidence until you've learned as much as you can
> towards preventing the problem from happening again.
We'll be a month or so to switching to 8.1, so I am sure that we'll have another core file which can kept. To the truth
Ihaven't pursued this much because
(a) it's an old revision and if time is to be spent swatting bugs it is better spent on current software, and besides
itmay a result of something already fixed;
(b) we're almost certain that this is a result of catastrophic failures in postGIS/GEOS under load. We typically see a
fewconnections go crazy and eat up all the RAM and CPU time; sometimes we've had to reboot to get things calm again.
Ourtesting of 8.0 w/ postGIS 1.0 led us to conclude that we will see far less of this, in that when we replayed a day's
trafficto the databases we saw no errors versus dozens from the same traffic on 7.4.
When I do find another core I'll people know if you care; the chances are quite good that we find the opportunity.
Alas, moving large systems in a company sometimes requires the subtle skills of a cat herder combined with the social
tactof an offensive linebacker.
Thanks again,
G