PG quitting sporadically!!

Hi,

I have been running PG for quite a while now.

Suddenly, the postmaster either hogs up memory or just croaks and
doesn't respond. The write process has become horribly slow.

Could it be that my data has grown so large that it's becoming an
issue? Even connecting to PGSQL as postgres user in SSH is way too
slow.

I am on a 4GB server with Apache 2.2.6 and PgSql 8.2.3. The same
server runs Apache, PgSQL, and MySQL. The last is not used for much,
just some simple logging and such. It seldom shows up in "TOP" output.

So the main heavy lifters are Apache and PgSQL.

In my PG_LOG files, I have many messages like these:

    LOG:  could not send data to client: Broken pipe
    LOG:  could not receive data from client: Connection reset by peer
    LOG:  unexpected EOF on client connection


What are these things? My conf file settings (which were working fine
until recently!) are as follows:


max_connections              = 150
shared_buffers               = 330MB
effective_cache_size         = 512000
max_fsm_relations            = 100
max_fsm_pages                = 300000
work_mem                     = 100MB
temp_buffers                 = 4096
authentication_timeout       = 10s
ssl                          = off

autovacuum                   = on
autovacuum_vacuum_cost_delay = 20
vacuum_cost_delay            = 20
autovacuum_naptime           = 10
stats_start_collector        = on
stats_row_level              = on
autovacuum_vacuum_threshold  = 75
autovacuum_analyze_threshold = 25
autovacuum_analyze_scale_factor  = 0.02
autovacuum_vacuum_scale_factor   = 0.01

wal_buffers                  = 128
checkpoint_segments          = 64
checkpoint_timeout           = 900
fsync                        = on
maintenance_work_mem         = 512MB


------------------------------------------------

1. VMSTAT -S

~ > vmstat -s
      4148844  total memory
      3771392  used memory
      3232328  active memory
       265652  inactive memory
       377452  free memory
        75044  buffer memory
      2890740  swap cache
      2096440  total swap
         6436  used swap
      2090004  free swap
     24821214 non-nice user cpu ticks
       229660 nice user cpu ticks
     14153129 system cpu ticks
    566198940 idle cpu ticks
     22918768 IO-wait cpu ticks
        75387 IRQ cpu ticks
            0 softirq cpu ticks
    153625372 pages paged in
    287656751 pages paged out
       175855 pages swapped in
       859894 pages swapped out
   1844498357 interrupts
    889200515 CPU context switches
   1201419806 boot time
     15735402 forks
------------------------------------------------

2. FREE -M


             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          4051       4025         26          0         74       2823
-/+ buffers/cache:       1127       2924
Swap:         2047          6       2041


------------------------------------------------

3. VACUUM ANALYE OUTPUT


This is the last few lines of this output:


0 index pages have been deleted, 0 are currently reusable.
CPU 0.00s/0.00u sec elapsed 0.00 sec.
INFO:  "clients": found 1 removable, 3031359 nonremovable row versions
in 199194 pages
DETAIL:  0 dead row versions cannot be removed yet.
There were 2624366 unused item pointers.
97747 pages contain useful free space.
0 pages are entirely empty.
CPU 0.00s/0.00u sec elapsed 235.21 sec.
INFO:  vacuuming "pg_toast.pg_toast_50002"
INFO:  index "pg_toast_50002_index" now contains 20 row versions in 2 pages
DETAIL:  0 index row versions were removed.
0 index pages have been deleted, 0 are currently reusable.
CPU 0.00s/0.00u sec elapsed 0.00 sec.
INFO:  "pg_toast_50002": found 0 removable, 20 nonremovable row
versions in 7 pages
DETAIL:  0 dead row versions cannot be removed yet.
There were 12 unused item pointers.
6 pages contain useful free space.
0 pages are entirely empty.
CPU 0.00s/0.00u sec elapsed 0.02 sec.
INFO:  analyzing "public.clients"
INFO:  "clients": scanned 7500 of 199194 pages, containing 114197 live
rows and 1 dead rows; 7500 rows in sample, 3032981 estimated total
rows
INFO:  free space map contains 98498 pages in 25 relations
DETAIL:  A total of 98720 page slots are in use (including overhead).
98720 page slots are required to track all free space.
Current limits are:  300000 page slots, 100 relations, using 1766 kB.

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