Re: FATAL: invalid frontend message type 8

Steve Crawford <scrawford@pinpointresearch.com> writes:
> I've started seeing the following in my logs:
> FATAL:  invalid frontend message type 8

> I searched back over a month and there are 5 instances of this error
> of which 4 are in the last 24 hours.

> I could not find this error defined. Any ideas of what it means, it's
> severity, how to track the cause and cure?

It looks to me like you've got an erroneous client that is sending bad
data.  The error is from tcop/postgres.c, when it doesn't recognize the
first byte of what should be a message:

        default:
            /*
             * Otherwise we got garbage from the frontend.  We treat this
             * as fatal because we have probably lost message boundary
             * sync, and there's no good way to recover.
             */
            ereport(FATAL,
                    (errcode(ERRCODE_PROTOCOL_VIOLATION),
                     errmsg("invalid frontend message type %d", qtype)));

Can you determine exactly which client-side code is provoking the error?

            regards, tom lane