Question

Postgres not able to start

Posted on August 25, 2016
PostgreSQL Ubuntu
Asked by 24326124313024794561526f2f3165

I have a problem with postgres not being able to start:

Starting PostgreSQL 9.5 database server * The PostgreSQL server failed to start. Please check the log output: 2016-08-25 04:20:53 EDT [1763-1] FATAL: could not map anonymous shared memory: Cannot allocate memory 2016-08-25 04:20:53 EDT [1763-2] HINT: This error usually means that PostgreSQL’s request for a shared memory segment exceeded available memory, swap space, or huge pages. To reduce the request size (currently 1124007936 bytes), reduce PostgreSQL’s shared memory usage, perhaps by reducing shared_buffers or max_connections. This is the response that I got. I checked the log in tail -f /var/log/postgresql/postgresql-9.5-main.logand I can see the same response.

Can someone suggest what can be the problem?

I used following commands to stop/start the postgres server on Ubuntu 14.04 with postgres 9.5:

sudo service postgresql stop sudo service postgresql start

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Ryan Quinn

DigitalOcean Employee

• August 25, 2016

Accepted Answer

As the error message indicates, you appear to not have enough available memory to start the service. You can check your available memory at any time by running the command:

free -m

When you see this error, aside from the suggestions for optimizations presented by the error message you can also add a swap file and/or upgrade to a larger droplet in order to have more memory+swap available for the PostgreSQL process.