Re: Invulnerable VACUUM process thrashing everything

In my experience a kill -9 has never resulted in any data loss in this
situation (it will cause postgres to detect that the process died, shut
down, then recover), and most of the time it only causes a 5-10sec
outage. I'd definitely hesitate to recommend it in a production context
though, especially since I think there are some known race-condition
bugs in 7.4.

VACUUM *will* respond to a SIGTERM, but it doesn't check very often -
I've often had to wait hours for it to determine that it's been killed,
and my tables aren't anywhere near 1TB. Maybe this is a place where
things could be improved...

Incidentally, I have to kill -9 some of our MySQL instances quite
regularly because they do odd things. Not something you want to be
doing, especially when MySQL takes 30mins to recover.

Russ Garrett
Last.fm Ltd.
russ@last.fm

Ron wrote:

> Ick.  Can you get users and foreign connections off that machine, lock
> them out for some period, and renice the VACUUM?
>
> Shedding load and keeping it off while VACUUM runs high priority might
> allow it to finish in a reasonable amount of time.
> Or
> Shedding load and dropping the VACUUM priority might allow a kill
> signal to get through.
>
> Hope this helps,
> Ron
>
>
> At 05:09 PM 12/29/2005, Jeffrey W. Baker wrote:
>
>> A few WEEKS ago, the autovacuum on my instance of pg 7.4 unilaterally
>> decided to VACUUM a table which has not been updated in over a year and
>> is more than one terabyte on the disk.  Because of the very high
>> transaction load on this database, this VACUUM has been ruining
>> performance for almost a month.  Unfortunately is seems invulnerable to
>> killing by signals:
>>
>> # ps ax | grep VACUUM
>> 15308 ?        D    588:00 postgres: postgres skunk [local] VACUUM
>> # kill -HUP 15308
>> # ps ax | grep VACUUM
>> 15308 ?        D    588:00 postgres: postgres skunk [local] VACUUM
>> # kill -INT 15308
>> # ps ax | grep VACUUM
>> 15308 ?        D    588:00 postgres: postgres skunk [local] VACUUM
>> # kill -PIPE 15308
>> # ps ax | grep VACUUM
>> 15308 ?        D    588:00 postgres: postgres skunk [local] VACUUM
>>
>> o/~ But the cat came back, the very next day ...
>>
>> I assume that if I kill this with SIGKILL, that will bring down every
>> other postgres process, so that should be avoided.  But surely there is
>> a way to interrupt this.  If I had some reason to shut down the
>> instance, I'd be screwed, it seems.
>
>
>
>
>
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