Re: Unkillable Backend Processes

On May 22, 2006, at 8:16 PM, Alvaro Herrera wrote:

> Thomas F. O'Connell wrote:
>
>> When I kill these off individually using kill and then shut down the
>> postmaster with pg_ctl immediate mode, I will occasionally find a
>> backend process that cannot be killed, even with a KILL (-9) signal.
>>
>> Is this likely to be caused by something at a lower level than
>> postgres?
>
> Nothing Postgres does is able to block a SIGKILL (-9) signal.  You can
> be certain that it is stuck in a system call, most likely reading
> something from disk.

That's what I thought. Thanks for the confirmation.

--
Thomas F. O'Connell
Database Architecture and Programming
Sitening, LLC

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