Re: Server Crash

On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 8:14 AM, Hajek, Nick <Nick.Hajek@vishay.com> wrote:
>
>
> All,
> We experienced a crash of a Postgresql server which from the log appears to
> have began with this entry:
>
> Log:  background writer process (PID 3457) was terminated by signal 9

Kill -9 is the "shoot it in the head" signal.  It is not generated by
postgresql in normal operation.  It can be generated by "pg_ctl -m
immediate stop" .  At least I think that's what signal it sends.

Anyway, the most common cause of kill -9s randomly showing up in linux
is the OOM killer.

It's quite possible you're running your machine out of memory / swap
somehow and linux is killing the biggest, fattest process it can find,
which is pgsql.

you might wanna run vmstat 1 to see what's happening during these times.