CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonpostgresqldatabase-connectionpsycopg2
Mayur Patel
Mayur Patel

Reputation: 113

Postgres 8.4.4 + psycopg2 + python 2.6.5 + Win7 instability

You can see the combination of software components I'm using in the title of the question.

I have a simple 10-table database running on a Postgres server (Win 7 Pro). I have client apps (python using psycopg to connect to Postgres) who connect to the database at random intervals to conduct relatively light transactions. There's only one client app at a time doing any kind of heavy transaction, and those are typically < 500ms. The rest of them spend more time connecting than actually waiting for the database to execute the transaction. The point is that the database is under light load, but the load is evenly split between reads and writes.

My client apps run as servers/services themselves. I've found that it is pretty common for me to be able to (1) take the Postgres server completely down, and (2) ruin the database by killing the client app with a keyboard interrupt.

By (1), I mean that the Postgres process on the server aborts and the service needs to be restarted.

By (2), I mean that the database crashes again whenever a client tries to access the database after it has restarted and (presumably) finished "recovery mode" operations. I need to delete the old database/schema from the database server, then rebuild it each time to return it to a stable state. (After recovery mode, I have tried various combinations of Vacuums to see whether that improves stability; the vacuums run, but the server will still go down quickly when clients try to access the database again.)

I don't recall seeing the same effect when I kill the client app using a "taskkill" - only when using a keyboard interrupt to take the python process down. It doesn't happen all the time, but frequently enough that it's a major concern (25%?).

Really surprised that anything on a client would actually be able to take down an "enterprise class" database. Can anyone share tips on how to improve robustness, and hopefully help me to understand why this is happening in the first place? Thanks, M

Upvotes: 0

Views: 682

Answers (1)

Scott Marlowe
Scott Marlowe

Reputation: 8910

If you're having problems with postgresql acting up like this, you should read this page:

http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Guide_to_reporting_problems

For an example of a real bug, and how to ask a question that gets action and answers, read this thread.

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2010-12/msg01030.php

Upvotes: 1

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