I have observed the following situation a few times now (weeks or months apart), most recently with 8.3.7. Some postgres child process crashes. The postmaster notices and sends SIGQUIT to all other children. Once all other children have exited, it would enter recovery. But for some reason, some children are not processing the SIGQUIT signal and are basically just stuck. That means the whole database system is then stuck and won't continue without manual intervention. If I go in manually and SIGKILL the offending processes, everything proceeds normally, recovery finishes, and the system is up again.
I haven't had the chance yet to analyze why the SIGQUIT signals are getting stuck. Be that as it may, it appears there are no provisions for this case. I couldn't find any documentation or previous reports on this sort of thing. One might imagine a feature where the postmaster resorts to throwing SIGKILLs around after a while, similar to how init scripts are sometimes set up. But perhaps manual intervention is the way to go. Comments? -- Sent via pgsql-admin mailing list (pgsql-admin@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-admin
