CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railspostgresqlheroku
James
James

Reputation: 5403

What's the cause of "PGError: FATAL: terminating connection due to administrator command" on heroku?

I have a rails app on heroku that users log in to. I periodically get this exception:

UserSessionsController# (ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid) "PGError: FATAL: terminating connection due to administrator command\nserver closed the connection unexpectedly\n\tThis probably means the server terminated abnormally\n\tbef...

URL

POST http://secure.huckberry.com/user_sessions

What's a likely cause of this? I'd appreciate any help.

Upvotes: 47

Views: 130124

Answers (7)

Konrad
Konrad

Reputation: 7228

For me this was caused by unattended upgrades as mentioned by this answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/76928063/2828480

But interesting fact is postgres itself wasn't being upgraded but some dependency of postgres that caused the restart.

I did some digging and I stumbled upon this answer https://askubuntu.com/a/1530298

Solution

in /etc/needrestart/conf.d directory create file and name it like postgres-no-restart.conf and paste this content:

# Disable automatic restart of PostgreSQL services
$nrconf{override_rc} = {
    '[email protected]' => 0,
    qr/^postgresql[@].*\.service$/ => 0  # This will match all postgresql@ services
};

This should prevent postgres restarting automatically when one of it's dependencies is automatically upgraded by unattended-upgrades

Upvotes: 1

Glen Agak
Glen Agak

Reputation: 81

The solution that worked for me here was simply to vaccum my bloated tables.

You can also turn autoVaccum off for your db, but i would NOT RECOMMEND this as it can have a massive negative impact on your DB performance.

VACUUM FULL VERBOSE ANALYZE <table_name>;

Upvotes: 0

SantaXL
SantaXL

Reputation: 674

This can also be caused by PostgreSQL receiving an unattended upgrade (/var/log/apt/history.log on Ubuntu) - in PostgreSQL's logs you will see

2023-08-18 06:29:57 UTC LOG:  received fast shutdown request
2023-08-18 06:29:57 UTC LOG:  aborting any active transactions
2023-08-18 06:29:57 UTC FATAL:  terminating connection due to administrator command

Upvotes: 2

Oliver Gro&#223;
Oliver Gro&#223;

Reputation: 119

This error may also appear, if you run a test suite which utilizes a database connection (PSQL in this case) and the test is still running (asynchronously). A tear down hook may terminate the connection when the test is still running and this ends up in this error message.

Upvotes: 3

rmcc
rmcc

Reputation: 783

This probably means that something sent the server process a SIGTERM signal. This could happen is if the postmaster gets a SIGINT from something. However, if you are able to reconnect that's not the case, because the postmaster would disallow new connections.

You're probably having a clash of some kind in your application. Enable query logging and check for something unusual.

Upvotes: 5

Randy Johnson
Randy Johnson

Reputation: 349

I had this error happen to me. My Application server had an open connection to the database. In my SSH terminal I added an ipaddress to the ph_hba.conf file and restarted the postgreSQL server.

That is when this error showed up. I refreshed my web page one time and the error was gone.

Upvotes: 3

fdr
fdr

Reputation: 467

Assuming you saw this recently, this is due to a recent bit of high-priority maintenance work to enable continuous backups on shared databases -- involving a server restart. You shouldn't worry about this error, provided it does not reproduce. I don't think that's very likely, so happy hacking!

Upvotes: 21

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