What happens when you kill the postmaster?

Started by Ralf Schuchardtabout 16 years ago2 messagesgeneral
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Hi,

on one of our Mac servers an update (Remote Desktop Client) killed yesterday the postmaster process. Apparently this did not have any influence on existing connections and therefore was not detected until some time later, when no connection for a backup could be made.

I have then closed all apps with connections to the database. This brought the whole cluster down. It restarted then with some transaction log rollback messages and seems to be running fine since then.

Can I now expect that the database is in a consistent state, or must I assume the database is corrupted?
I could run a dump-all without problems and there are rows created after the death the postmaster.

Thanks.

Ralf Schuchardt

#2Filip Rembiałkowski
plk.zuber@gmail.com
In reply to: Ralf Schuchardt (#1)
Re: What happens when you kill the postmaster?

2010/1/13 Ralf Schuchardt <rasc@gmx.de>

Hi,

on one of our Mac servers an update (Remote Desktop Client) killed
yesterday the postmaster process. Apparently this did not have any influence
on existing connections and therefore was not detected until some time
later, when no connection for a backup could be made.

I have then closed all apps with connections to the database. This brought
the whole cluster down. It restarted then with some transaction log rollback
messages and seems to be running fine since then.

Can I now expect that the database is in a consistent state, or must I
assume the database is corrupted?
I could run a dump-all without problems and there are rows created after
the death the postmaster.

It depends on the signal which was sent to the postgres process.

AFAIK, only SIGKILL (unconditional kill) can make some damage to the
database.

see http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/static/app-postgres.html forfull
explanation

Thanks.

Ralf Schuchardt
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Filip Rembiałkowski
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