Question

I have written a C extension library for PG, using V1 calling convention. My db is ver 8.4.
I have successfully created the new functions.

However, when I invoke my new functions, it crashes the server, with the following message sent to the console:

The connection to the server was lost. Attempting reset: Failed.

The server log contains the line:

server process (PID 14751) was terminated by signal 11: Segmentation fault

I want to attach gdb to the postgres process, and see if I can obtain a stack trace, to help me start debugging. However, when I run

ps aux | grep postgres

to try to locate the postgres process, there seems to be several processes called postgres.

How may I correctly identify the postgres server process (after restarted) for debugging purposes as described above?

Answer 1

I just found out the answer to this. The database name is also part of the ps aux output.

For example:

postgres  1071  0.0  0.1 101120  5360 ?        S    Jan03   0:01 /usr/lib/postgresql/8.4/bin/postgres -D /var/lib/postgresql/8.4/main -c config_file=/etc/postgresql/8.4/main/postgresql.conf
postgres 11866  0.0  0.1  68444  4340 pts/1    S+   10:16   0:00 /usr/lib/postgresql/8.4/bin/psql postgres
postgres 14856  0.0  0.1 103612  4716 ?        Ss   14:56   0:00 postgres: postgres mydatabase [local] idle  
postgres 14894  0.0  0.0 101120  1640 ?        Ss   15:05   0:00 postgres: writer process  

The process id in this case is 14856