Craig Ringer wrote:
> Is there any chance you have EVER hard-killed the postmaster manually
> (eg with "kill -9" or "kill -KILL")? If you do that and don't also kill
> the backends, it's my understanding that BAD things may happen
> especially if you then attempt to relaunch the postmaster.
There is safeguards against that. If postmaster dies, the backends
should die quickly and gracefully too. And postmaster refuses to restart
until all the backends have died and detached from the shared memory
segment.
In addition to Craig's question: have you ever experienced sudden power
loss, or operating system crash on these machines? Have you done "kill
-9 postmaster", "pg_ctl stop -m immediate", or similar? PostgreSQL
should recover with no data corruption, of course, but if there's a bug
somewhere, it would help to know where to look.
--
Heikki Linnakangas
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com
