DB Cluster hanging

Hi,

I'm hoping that someone will be able to answer this query:

Last night at 3am our Postgresql DB cluster hung.  At the time data
was being loaded.  The parameter log_statement_stats in the
postgresql.conf file was set to true.  This was churning out data into
the logfile which was switching every 10Mb.  Eventually the partition
where the logfiles are written to filled up – fair enough – this had
been going on since about 5.30pm the previous evening and the logfiles
were being generated at the rate of 4/5 a minute.  The partition was
cleared of old logs and I expected the DB to spring in to life, but no
it just sat there.  I could not connect with psql or pg_ctl to
shutdown the cluster.

Eventually I had to issue a kill -9 on the postmaster, set
log_statement_stats to false and restarted the cluster, It recovered
itself and the data load carried on.

My question is, is this normal behaviour when the logfile destination
fills up?  There was nothing in the logfile being used at the time of
the hang, just stats data.

 PG version 8.0.3 with archived WAL logs enabled

O/S version RH ES4 with 2 CPUs & 2Gb RAM

Thanks very much for any input.


Regards,

Nigel Bishop