LinuxQuestions.org - Sygfault: overcommit_memory problem on database server

Hello,
After configuring new database (postgresql) server on Centos 6.3, we got a problem, database randomly stops with "Out of memory" error and such event are written in to the messages log:

Code:

Aug  1 09:48:20 dbsrv kernel: postmaster[20474]: segfault at 7600000091 ip 00000000006e34a0 sp 00007fff896a8ca0 error 6 in postgres[400000+4e6000]

Aug  1 10:31:19 dbsrv kernel: postmaster[26091]: segfault at 140000002c ip 00000000006e34a0 sp 00007fffe2189b00 error 6 in postgres[400000+4e6000]

Aug  1 10:35:31 dbsrv kernel: postmaster[30559]: segfault at 3bc6299690 ip 000000000062e103 sp 00007fffe218a750 error 4 in postgres[400000+4e6000]

Aug  1 11:21:21 dbsrv kernel: postmaster[1744]: segfault at 28 ip 00000000006e34a0 sp 00007fff197630f0 error 6 in postgres[400000+4e6000]

Aug  1 12:17:47 dbsrv kernel: postmaster[3402]: segfault at 6e ip 000000000046efb7 sp 00007fff34f5f310 error 4 in postgres[400000+4e6000]

Aug  1 13:04:18 dbsrv kernel: php[2700]: segfault at 0 ip 00007f5fb157d859 sp 00007fffacc86e00 error 4 in pdo_pgsql.so[7f5fb1577000+8000]

Server has 16GB memory in use and several php services + postgreslq 9.1.4 database installed.

Server kernel custom configuration:

Code:

kernel.shmmax = 8363171840

kernel.shmall = 2041790

vm.swappiness = 0

vm.overcommit_memory = 2

As desribed in a postgres manual starting from kernel 2.5, the vm.overcommit_memory = 2 politics is the best for postgresql database.

Uname: Linux dbsrv 2.6.32-279.2.1.el6.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri Jul 20 01:55:29 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Postgres configuration:

Code:

shared_memory 2GB

work_mem 32MB

max_connection 456

Server have at least 3GB free RAM when apllication crashes and about 8GB of cache. Used RAM is not much than 3-4GB.

In a such configuration database or running services craches randomly. After several hours of studying we discovered that runing RAM consumption applications increase a probability of a crash, tried vim a large file, or memtest 3000. In both cases server craches with segfault.

After reconfiguring kernel to vm.overcommit_memory = 0, problem was solved and no crashed was detected from that moment at all.

The question is, why this is happening? What we have misconfigured and why vm.overcommit_memory = 2 is not working?