This is the third post in a small series dedicated to analysing and dealing with deadlocks in PostgreSQL, and provides a real bugfixing case study. Check the first article for an introduction and the second one for guidelines and techniques.

This post describes how I attempted fixing a real deadlock bug in SUSE Manager, which is also affecting the Spacewalk project it’s based upon. Hopefully it will shed light to someone fixing a similar issue!

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This is the second post in a small series dedicated to analysing and dealing with deadlocks in PostgreSQL, and provides a general workflow to handle deadlock bugs and details on how to get information from PostgresSQL.

If you need a gentler introduction, take a look at the first article in this series.

Debugging a deadlock – a workflow

If you have to deal with a deadlock in a complex application, usually you’ll have a defect that appears in time-dependent, load-dependent and user-dependent way. It’s all too easy to get lost in hypotheses! To avoid that try to work in a scientific way and follow a strategy.

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This is the first post in a small series dedicated to analysing and dealing with deadlocks in PostgreSQL, and provides a rather gentle introduction to the topic.

What is a deadlock?

A deadlock is a situation in which a DBMS cannot execute all concurrent transactions running in a specific point in time. It must, and it will, automatically kill some of them in order to complete others.

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