Re: [GENERAL] postmaster never finishes starting up, silent to boot

2009-03-18 Thread Scott Marlowe
On top of what the other poster said, I'm wondering if you're not
getting any kind of postmaster not cleanly shutdown, recovery
initiated or something like that when you first start it up.  You
don't tend to see a lot of messages after that until recovery is
completed.

What does top and / or vmstat or other system monitoring tools say
about activity?  I'm guessing you just need more patience while pgsql
recovers from the unclean shutdown.  But it could be something more.
Hard to say with what you've told us so far.

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Re: [GENERAL] postmaster never finishes starting up, silent to boot

2009-03-18 Thread Aaron Glenn
On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 11:27 PM, Scott Marlowe scott.marl...@gmail.com wrote:
 Hard to say with what you've told us so far.

what more should I post/need? I was suspecting that as well as I've
never had postgres be silent and not work -- I've also never let a db
fill its disk and get f'ed like this. should I just let the pg_ctl
start run it's course? for a 35GB+ database how long should I wait? is
there no way to log the status of what the postgres daemon is actually
doing while I wait? what's the standard course of action for a
postgres instance that filled its disk and shut itself down -- if
there is one?

apologies for the admittedly amateur questions but I haven't been able
to find much for the situation I'm in.


thanks,
aaron

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Re: [GENERAL] postmaster never finishes starting up, silent to boot

2009-03-18 Thread Scott Marlowe
On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 2:18 AM, Aaron Glenn aaron.gl...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 11:27 PM, Scott Marlowe scott.marl...@gmail.com 
 wrote:
 Hard to say with what you've told us so far.

 what more should I post/need? I was suspecting that as well as I've

Remember that mentiion of vmstat and top I made in my last post?
That's a good starting point.

 never had postgres be silent and not work -- I've also never let a db
 fill its disk and get f'ed like this. should I just let the pg_ctl
 start run it's course? for a 35GB+ database how long should I wait? is
 there no way to log the status of what the postgres daemon is actually
 doing while I wait? what's the standard course of action for a
 postgres instance that filled its disk and shut itself down -- if
 there is one?

Waiting is pretty much it, assuming it's doing something.

 apologies for the admittedly amateur questions but I haven't been able
 to find much for the situation I'm in.

Yeah, it's not that common.  So, is the machine truly sitting idle
during this period or is it trying to recover is the real question.

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Re: [GENERAL] postmaster never finishes starting up, silent to boot

2009-03-18 Thread Ray Stell
On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 01:18:46AM -0700, Aaron Glenn wrote:
 On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 11:27 PM, Scott Marlowe scott.marl...@gmail.com 
 wrote:
 start run it's course? for a 35GB+ database how long should I wait? is
 there no way to log the status of what the postgres daemon is actually
 doing while I wait? what's the standard course of action for a

use strace or dtrace to connect to the pid.  It should give you 
a clue.

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[GENERAL] postmaster never finishes starting up, silent to boot

2009-03-17 Thread Aaron Glenn
Greetings,

I've gotten myself in a pickle and had a postgresql (8.2) instance
fill its disk completely and shutdown itself down. I've moved the
entire data directory to a new, larger slice however postmaster never
finishes starting. Despite configuring postgresql.conf for excessive
'verboseness' nothing gets outputted to syslog or the --log specified
file.  I have a feeling I'm just not hitting the right search terms,
but shouldn't I be able to simply start a fully copied data directory
without issue? at the very least I'd expect some kind of output to
some kind of log. I have to kill it with a 'pg_ctl stop -D /mnt/data
-m i' -- immediate is the only one that actually kills it; and I get
this in syslog:

Mar 17 22:36:49 rtg postgres[1879]: [8-1] WARNING:  terminating
connection because of crash of another server process
Mar 17 22:36:49 rtg postgres[1879]: [8-2] DETAIL:  The postmaster has
commanded this server process to roll back the current transaction and
exit, because another server
Mar 17 22:36:49 rtg postgres[1879]: [8-3]  process exited abnormally
and possibly corrupted shared memory.
Mar 17 22:36:49 rtg postgres[1879]: [8-4] HINT:  In a moment you
should be able to reconnect to the database and repeat your command.
Mar 17 22:36:49 rtg postgres[1879]: [8-5] CONTEXT:  xlog redo zeropage: 16645

there are no other postgres instances running on this machine;
actually there is nothing else but the OS running on this machine.

Appreciate a cluebat hit.

thanks,
aaron.glenn

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Re: [GENERAL] postmaster never finishes starting up, silent to boot

2009-03-17 Thread Greg Smith

On Tue, 17 Mar 2009, Aaron Glenn wrote:

Despite configuring postgresql.conf for excessive 'verboseness' nothing 
gets outputted to syslog or the --log specified file.


You shouldn't trust those destinations for getting really unusual errors 
starting the server.  Change your log_destination temporarily back to just 
stderr and start the server with a simple pg_ctl start.  Errors will 
show up on the terminal.  If that works but doesn't tell you anything 
interesting about why startup isn't going correctly, try changing 
log_min_messages=debug2 ; that will show you a bunch more information 
about what's happening.


If you didn't delete the pid file after the crash or the old server is 
still holding onto some shared memory/ports, that might be causing your 
problem.  Another possibility is that you don't have the right permissions 
on the copy.  Once you get the log output on the screen it should narrow 
the possibilities here.


--
* Greg Smith gsm...@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD

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