Re: Postmaster hangs

Karen Pease wrote:
> kill -9 does kill postmaster (or at least seems to).  But I can't figure
> out a way to get it restarted without a reboot -- I don't know what I'm
> missing.  The Fedora postgres restart scripts don't do the trick, and I
> couldn't get it to work with pg_ctl either.

It'd help to know where the postmaster was stuck, and if possible where
the backend you were using is stuck.

A backtrace from gdb can be handy for this.

http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Getting_a_stack_trace_of_a_running_PostgreSQL_backend_on_Linux/BSD

> kill -9 doesn't work on the locked up httpd processes.  So that has to
> have the system restarted.

If `kill -9' isn't working they're probably in uninterruptable sleep in
the kernel.

You can find out what they're sleeping in with `ps':

  ps ax -o pid,ppid,stat,wchan:50,cmd

(Filter for just the postmaster and postgres processes if you want)

> Both filesystems are EXT-4.

That's interesting given the issues you're having...

--
Craig Ringer