Postgres Crash: Segmentation Fault

Sometimes we see that the postgres server crashes while running some command and in this blog we shall see how to check if it caused by segmentation fault.

Problem:

The server crashed while I was running a command.

 server closed the connection unexpectedly
 This probably means the server terminated abnormally
 before or while processing the request.
 The connection to the server was lost.
 Attempting reset: Failed.!>

The postgres logfile showed:

LOG: server process (PID 2779) was terminated by signal 11: Segmentation fault

Debug:

Attach gdb to the core dump generated and it will show the location which threw the segmentation fault error.  core.2779 is the name of my core dump file.

$ gdb postgres core.2779
Using host libthread_db library "/lib64/libthread_db.so.1".
Core was generated by `postgres: emerson postgres [local] CREATE INDEX '.
Program terminated with signal 11, Segmentation fault.
#0 0x000000000059487a in function (arguments) at file_name.c:527

527 bool hasnulls = TupleHasNulls(tuple);

From here we can determine what has caused the error.