Unable to kill local COPY - Mailing list pgsql-general

From Naoko Reeves
Subject Unable to kill local COPY
Date
Msg-id AANLkTi=TUQwyRuD6bjaAOd4-GNp+-PrcUUc-Y1vf4rGi@mail.gmail.com
Whole thread Raw
List pgsql-general
version: 8.3
The other day, my DB stop processing request. It still accepts connections but not processing those.
So I quit all client connections from client yet those process still alive on SQL Server.
I tried to Stop DB by issuing pt_ctl STOP -m fast but failed to shut down database. 
Next I issued pg_ctl stop -m immediate. I think this one killed all processes that were from client. 
The returning message says the server was stopped.
So I issued ps -ef | grep postgres but master and 4 child processes were still there...

  502   150     1   0   0:10.70 ??         0:12.69 /Library/PostgresPlus/8.3/bin/postgres -D /data
  502   165   150   0   0:03.71 ??         0:05.15 postgres: logger process                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            
  502   171   150   0   0:44.15 ??         1:06.28 postgres: writer process                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            
  502 72026   150   0   0:00.15 ??         0:00.87 postgres: postgres mydata [local] VACUUM                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
  502 81413   150   0   0:00.48 ??         0:06.52 postgres: postgres mydata 127.0.0.1(56760) COPY

I then tried to kill the following process
 502 81413   150   0   0:00.48 ??         0:06.52 postgres: postgres mydata 127.0.0.1(56760) COPY
even with -s 15 I could not kill....

So what I end up doing was to hard reboot the machine...

I have questions:
1) Did I have better choice than hard-reboot the machine? (soft reboot didn't work).
2) The COPY command I was tying to kill is local request. Is this the process postgres trying to write changes to the disk? If so, what could I have done to data?

Thank you very much for your time.
 

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