Hi,
for some time a postgres process on one of our web servers repeatedly gets into an infinite loop. This happens very rarely, about once in a week. Today I installed gdb on the server to trace down the problem.
I found out that the process was looping in enlargeStringInfo() in backend/lib/stringinfo.c. The call trace was
#0 0x0810e490 in enlargeStringInfo () #1 0x081138e4 in pq_getmessage () #2 0x0816561b in SocketBackend () #3 0x081657bb in ReadCommand () #4 0x08167a5e in PostgresMain () #5 0x08144353 in BackendFork () #6 0x08143d33 in BackendStartup () #7 0x08142516 in ServerLoop () #8 0x08142057 in PostmasterMain () #9 0x08114a4d in main () #10 0x400e8857 in __libc_start_main () from /lib/libc.so.6
The "needed" argument to enlargeStringInfo was 0x5454502b, apparently caused by another bug, which I have yet to find.
So the following loop never stops
while (needed > newlen)
newlen = 2 * newlen;because needed and newlen are compared as signed integers. (If "newlen" has grown to 0x40000000 it's still smaller than "needed". Multiplying by 2 overflows and yields 0x80000000, which is negative, thus still smaller than "needed". Multiplying by 2 again yields 0, ...)
The numbers should be compared as unsigned ints. Or the maximum string length should be restricted.
On the other hand I wonder if it's desired to even try the following memory allocation of at least a GB of RAM. The pq_getmessage() that called enlargeStringInfo() has a "maxlen" argument of 0, that seems to mean unlimited.
The real cause of the problem seems to be a frontend/backend communication problem. The "needed" argument 0x5454502b comes from a 4-byte length field which string content is 'TTP/'. Looks like a part of a HTTP request to me.
I'm using Apache/mod_perl/DBI to access Postgres. Can I log the frontend/backend communication somehow?
Nick Wellnhofer
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