Re: (Never?) Kill Postmaster? - Mailing list pgsql-general

From Tom Lane
Subject Re: (Never?) Kill Postmaster?
Date
Msg-id 15659.1193952495@sss.pgh.pa.us
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: (Never?) Kill Postmaster?  ("Scott Marlowe" <scott.marlowe@gmail.com>)
Responses Re: (Never?) Kill Postmaster?  (Christian Schröder <cs@deriva.de>)
List pgsql-general
"Scott Marlowe" <scott.marlowe@gmail.com> writes:
> Tom, is it possible the backend was doing something that couldn't be
> immediately interrupted, like a long wait on IO or something?

Sherlock Holmes said that theorizing in advance of the data is a capital
mistake...

What we can be reasonably certain of is that that backend wasn't
reaching any CHECK_FOR_INTERRUPTS() macros.  Whether it was hung up
waiting for something, or caught in a tight loop somewhere, is
impossible to say without more data than we have.  AFAIR the OP didn't
even mention whether the backend appeared to be consuming CPU cycles
(which'd be a pretty fair tip about which of those to believe, but still
not enough to guess *where* the problem is). A gdb backtrace would tell
us more.

            regards, tom lane

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