Re: Engine Crashes - Are they acceptable? (fwd)

Bill Ennis wrote: > > > Hi, > > Under what situations is it acceptable for the Informix Engine > to crash? > It depends on what you mean by acceptable. I don't think we should get into situations where we need to bring the engine down, but if something does go wrong, we sometimes do need to abort the online instance so that possible shared memory corruption doesn't get written to disk. > Are these bugs? I would think there would be a VERY limited set of > circumstances where the engine going down is acceptable yet when I call > into tech suuport there doesn't seem to be much concern or help. The systems > come back up after the crash and thats all tech support seems to care about. Assertion failures are the hardest cases to deal with. Usually the customer calls after the engine has crashed and by that time there is usually very little information we can obtain. In these cases we generally need a stack trace from the thread that causes the engine to abort to try and determine if it is a known problem or not. There are a couple ways to try and get this stack trace. One is with a debugger and on hp I believe that is xdb. Also check the files the assertion failure mentioned. In some versions we have automatic stack trace dumps in the af.xxxxx files. These are critical in trying to isolate these to known problems. I certainly do not think crashes are acceptable, but a crash that the online system recovers from is better then one that it doesn't. In the event of future crashes try to make sure you have the following information to give to tech support so they can try and determine if this crash is an already reported problem: the assertion failure message in the online log, the af.xxxxx file the assertion failure message references, and if possible a stack trace from the vp that go the assertion failure. Be forwarned that because we get all this doesn't always mean we will be able to isolate it to a known problem. If this can't be isolated to a known problem there will be much more work involved to get to the bottom of why the crash is happening. Jacques -- ******************************************************************** * Jacques P. Renaut "I'd dazzle you with brilliance * * Informix Advanced Support if I only had the knack..." * * email: jrenaut@informix.com #include <disclamier.h> * ********************************************************************