Re: pg_ctl stop failure

On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 10:47 PM, Birchall, Austen
<austen.birchall@metoffice.gov.uk> wrote:
> 8.4.13 & PostGIS 2.0 on Red Hat 6
>
> I want to do a offline backup of /var/lib/pgsql/data
>
> But whenever I do
>
> Pg_ctl stop
>
> I get
>
> -bash-4.1$ pg_ctl stop
> waiting for server to shut down............................................................... failed
> pg_ctl: server does not shut down
>

This means you have clients connected to the database and server won't
shut down until all the clients have disconnected.

> 1. If I do
>
> pg_ctl stop -m f
>
> the cluster and databases shutdown as required but is this a clean and/or consistent shutdown of the cluster in the
sensethat I could recover from the OS 
>

"-m f " mode disconnects those clients for you. pg_ctl Documentation
at http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/static/app-pg-ctl.html
says:
"Fast" mode does not wait for clients to disconnect and will terminate
an online backup in progress. All active transactions are rolled back
and clients are forcibly disconnected, then the server is shut down.

So what you have is a consistent shut down with incomplete
transactions rolled back. By the way, could you see any active
connections while you tried stopping the server?

--
Amit Langote