First, I better let you know that we have an in-house patch already on our postgres, so this may be our breakage. It only started happening recently, though, and our patch is quite old, so it is very unlikely.
I thought I'd ask here anyway, incase this was a known bug that was fixed already. I couldn't see anything in the release notes, however. Postgres 7.4.1. (Yes I know, we _should_ upgrade). PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 27583 postgres 15 0 163m 163m 159m R 97.2 16.2 14:36.01 postmaster As the subject says, it is spinning at 99% CPU. Memory consumption does not appear to be increasing. This backend has recently lost its client connection, and it appeared after I shutdown a bunch of JDBC connections: uke19:~# netstat -np | grep 27583 tcp 1 0 127.0.0.1:5432 127.0.0.1:35175 CLOSE_WAIT 27583/postgres This happened 3 times last week, too. Never 'idle in transaction' until last night, however, when it managed to lose its connection while 'idle in transaction'. This left some things locked, and I had to kill it. I only noticed this problem after messing with some settings in the configuration file: max_connections = 88 superuser_reserved_connections = 4 wal_buffers = 544 Around the same time, I changed the java code to close down the database connections properly, doing conn.close() on pg connections. We are using 'postgresql-jdbc3.jar' that is in the 'libpgjava' Debian package. You can even have a backtrace, how about that: (gdb) attach 27583 Attaching to process 27583 0x0811cf40 in enlargeStringInfo () (gdb) bt #0 0x0811cf40 in enlargeStringInfo () #1 0x081249b8 in pq_getmessage () #2 0x0817bdfe in HandleFunctionRequest () #3 0x0817bfda in HandleFunctionRequest () #4 0x0817eacc in PostgresMain () #5 0x0815877b in ClosePostmasterPorts () #6 0x08158163 in ClosePostmasterPorts () #7 0x08156658 in PostmasterMain () #8 0x08155ce4 in PostmasterMain () #9 0x08125cb6 in main () #10 0x4026eda6 in __libc_start_main () from /lib/libc.so.6 I can get a stack data dump from gdb if requested, and I'll leave this attached to gdb for now. I'll probably need to restart postgres soon (to try some more settings) so I dont want to leave it attached _too_ long.. ;) .Guy ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 9: the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match