"Albert REINER" <areiner@tph.tuwien.ac.at> writes:
> I'm still using Linux kernel 2.0.35 (SuSE 5.3), but planning to
> upgrade the kernel. I also built Postgres 6.5.1 with locale support.
Hmm. I recall several different reports of weird problems seen with
concurrently running backends that went away after an upgrade from
kernel 2.0.35 or earlier to 2.0.36 or later. Apparently, some
significant bugs in Linux's handling of SysV semaphores were corrected
at 2.0.36 --- and Postgres depends heavily on semaphores. However,
I wouldn't really expect that to be a problem unless you were running
several backends concurrently. It wasn't clear if you had other
things going on besides the VACUUM or not.
I forgot to mention yesterday: if you track down the vacuum error
message as I suggested, and it's something about "can't destroy
lock file", then you just need to update to 6.5.2 and the problem
should go away. If it's something else then more investigation
will be needed.
regards, tom lane