Hi,

we've got a production server for an insurance company running a Squeak 
3.5 image on the 3.6b6 VM on Debian Linux. Unfortunately there are 
mysterious problems with the sockets when accessing PostgreSQL from 
within Squeak. We wrote workarounds, that just retry if a connection is 
failing, but this isn't helping much anymore. 

As it is a critical business application the client is not only 
complaining but even beginning to sue for damage, that we are unable to 
afford as a little internet agency! This means that *we won't be ever 
able to use squeak again* and that we have to go back to other solutions 
like Python or ASP.

To the problem: we've got a couple of connections being used by 
different threads executing queries on postgres. During heavy load - and 
this is where most of the time the problem shows up - there are about 
300 queries executed sequentially on one connection by one thread. Most 
often, the connections are suddenly closed, even before Squeak starts to 
wait for the data.

This was the part, to stress the *urgency* and to explain the background 
for the following questions:

1. Are the sockets in Squeak at all being able to be used from different 
threads?

2. Could it be that the production server is too fast? We didn't have 
those problems on the development machines (macintosh and windows).

3. Should we try another VM, another image, another postgres client?

4. Is there anybody in this mailing-list able to help with that kind of 
problems? We are lost and are really fed up with those Squeak sockets! 
We would be even willing to pay the one that is able to solve the 
problem.

Lukas

-- 
Lukas Renggli
http://renggli.freezope.org