Re: PG service restart failure (start getting ahead of stop?)

George Pavlov wrote:
> We have a nightly restart of one PG database. Today it failed and I
> can't seem to understand why and how to prevent this in the future (nor
> can I reproduce the problem).
>
>
If you get the PID of the psql server process then invoke a STOP, then
have a loop waiting for that PID to disappear, then run your START, it
may do what you want. Or someone may have a more elegant solution :-)

Brent Wood



> We have a line in a shell script that calls "/etc/init.d/postgresql
> restart". In the shell script's log from this invocation I have:
>
>   Stopping postgresql service: [FAILED]
>   Starting postgresql service: [  OK  ]
>
> The outcome of this was that the service was not running (despite the "[
> OK  ]" on the second line). The query log from that run ends with:
>
>   2007-04-23 03:03:59 PDT [23265] LOG:  received fast shutdown request
>   2007-04-23 03:03:59 PDT [23265] LOG:  aborting any active transactions
>   2007-04-23 03:03:59 PDT [26749] FATAL:  terminating connection due to
> administrator command
>   <... snipped more lines like the one above ...>
>   2007-04-23 03:03:59 PDT [24090] LOG:  could not send data to client:
> Broken pipe
>   2007-04-23 03:03:59 PDT [26700] FATAL:  terminating connection due to
> administrator command
>   <... snipped more lines like the one above ...>
>   2007-04-23 03:04:13 PDT [26820] FATAL:  the database system is
> shutting down
>   <... snipped more lines like the one above ...>
>   2007-04-23 03:06:10 PDT [23269] LOG:  shutting down
>   2007-04-23 03:06:10 PDT [23269] LOG:  database system is shut down
>   2007-04-23 03:06:13 PDT [23267] LOG:  logger shutting down
>   <end of log>
>
> So it looks like the STOPPING of the service actually succeeded, albeit
> it took a while (more than the usual sessions open?). The STARTING is
> the one that actually failed (is that because the STOP was still in
> process?).  The question is why -- in a RESTART situation
> wouldn't/shouldn't the START part wait for the STOP part to complete
> (regardless of how long it takes)?
>
> Also what can we do to avoid this in the future? We can issue a separate
> STOP and then a START X minutes later, but how long an X? It would seem
> that a RESTART is really what I want...
>
> TIA,
>
> George
>
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