Re: (Never?) Kill Postmaster?

Hi,

First you need to identify the correct postgresql process. Postgresql spawns an individual server process for each database connection. They look something like this:

postgres 27296  7089  9 08:00 ?        00:05:52 postgres: username databasename [local] idle

If a query was running then it would say 'SELECT' instead of 'idle'.

You can send a SIGINT (ie, -2) to that process to cancel a query, eg

kill -2 27296

In most systems SIGINT is the default for kill so you could just do kill <pid>.

The tip is ''kill -9' the postmaster', which has two important differences to the scenario I just described:

1) kill -9 means the OS kills the process without allowing it to clean up after itself

2) The postmaster is the master postgresql backend process. If you want to kill a single query you would not want to kill that.

Regards // Mike

Hi there,