The other day I blogged about the fact that I thought partitioning was broken in 5.1.18.
There does in fact appear a bug that was introduced somewhere between 5.1.17 and 5.1.18 which is causing MySQL to dump core.
I tried recompiling 5.1.18 from source and the problem remained. Installing a 5.1.17 source build fixed the problem and we’ve been online for almost 72 hours without a core dump. By way of comparison 5.1.18 wouldn’t stan up for more than a few hours.
I’m not sure I have a ton of time to debug the issue but I wanted to get the information out into the public.