Am 27.10.2009 um 09:54 schrieb Herbert Poetzl: > please try with a working kernel and not with the > known-broken debian kernel, and recent util-vserver, > if the issue persists, please run an 'strace -fF' of > postgress for some activity, so that we can take a > look what happens on the query ... Ok, now I'm testing in VMware with a new kernel.. host:~# uname -a Linux host 2.6.31.5-vs2.3.0.36.21-beng #1 SMP Mon Oct 26 11:23:38 GMT 2009 x86_64 GNU/Linux host:~# vserver --version vserver 0.30.216-pre2849 host:~# ipcs ------ Shared Memory Segments -------- key shmid owner perms bytes nattch status 0x0052e2c1 0 postgres 600 378953728 4 ------ Semaphore Arrays -------- key semid owner perms nsems 0x0052e2c1 0 postgres 600 17 0x0052e2c2 32769 postgres 600 17 0x0052e2c3 65538 postgres 600 17 0x0052e2c4 98307 postgres 600 17 0x0052e2c5 131076 postgres 600 17 0x0052e2c6 163845 postgres 600 17 0x0052e2c7 196614 postgres 600 17 ------ Message Queues -------- key msqid owner perms used-bytes messages host:~# vserver guest1 enter guest1:/# /etc/init.d/postgresql-8.4 start Starting PostgreSQL 8.4 database server: main. guest1:/# ipcs ------ Shared Memory Segments -------- key shmid owner perms bytes nattch status ------ Semaphore Arrays -------- key semid owner perms nsems ------ Message Queues -------- key msqid owner perms used-bytes messages The guest has following flags set: VIRT_MEM VIRT_UPTIME VIRT_LOAD VIRT_CPU 1. Try with no rss.soft and rss.hard set: Within the guest, I can open up as many connections to it's Postgres as I want and execute the same query on every connection. After a while, the guest's "top" shows a complete filled memory, no swapping, and no kill to any process. Further connections and queries are ok, available memory stays the same (filled). Almost the same result as with Postgres on the host, except that the host's "top" shows the amount of used memory at about +/- Postgres' shm, it never got filled (shm set to about 25% of available memory) 2. Try with rss.soft set to 75% of hosts memory, no rss.hard set: Same as above, except swap got also filled. No kill, further connections and queries made no difference. Everything is working. 3. Try with rss.soft set to 75% of host memory, rss.hard set to rss.soft + 100MB: Memory got filled, swap got filled and then comes a kill and a complete freeze (incl host!): Kernel panic - not syncing: Out of memory and no killable process I don't know if the complete freeze is due to the lack of installed vmware tools, but I think, it shouldn't. Do you still need the strace logs? If I strace Postgres' main process, the got very very big!?