I am running postgresql 8.3, I was not aware of the 3 options (smart,
fast, or immediate). So it used the default - "fast".
The state of the server when I sent this e-mail was that there were
two remaining connections/postgres subprocesses. I used kill -9 to
stop those two subprocesses. Then postgres was able to stop normally.
After that, I restarted postgresql normally and it went into recovery
mode for about 30 seconds. After that, it started to behave normally
again.
On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 9:34 PM, Scott Marlowe <scott.marlowe@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 7:12 PM, John Cheng <chonger.cheng@gmail.com> wrote:
>> We had a run away process on our database box that used up all the
>> physical and all the virtual memory (swap). This caused the RedHat
>> Linux oom-killer to kill many processes, including some Postgres ones.
>> Postgres went into a funky state after that time:
>
> SNIP
>
>> I think the fact that a process used up all the available memory
>> (physical and virtual) caused Postgres to go into a weird state. Now
>> it will not respond to kill, or pg_ctl for shutdown. Would the right
>> thing to do be using kill -9 to stop the server?
>
> When you say it won't respond to pg_ctl for shutdown, have you tried
> the three options for the -m switch in order? Are you running a
> pretty recent pg version? Which one?
>
--
- John L Cheng
