A few WEEKS ago, the autovacuum on my instance of pg 7.4 unilaterally decided to VACUUM a table which has not been updated in over a year and is more than one terabyte on the disk. Because of the very high transaction load on this database, this VACUUM has been ruining performance for almost a month. Unfortunately is seems invulnerable to killing by signals: # ps ax | grep VACUUM 15308 ? D 588:00 postgres: postgres skunk [local] VACUUM # kill -HUP 15308 # ps ax | grep VACUUM 15308 ? D 588:00 postgres: postgres skunk [local] VACUUM # kill -INT 15308 # ps ax | grep VACUUM 15308 ? D 588:00 postgres: postgres skunk [local] VACUUM # kill -PIPE 15308 # ps ax | grep VACUUM 15308 ? D 588:00 postgres: postgres skunk [local] VACUUM o/~ But the cat came back, the very next day ... I assume that if I kill this with SIGKILL, that will bring down every other postgres process, so that should be avoided. But surely there is a way to interrupt this. If I had some reason to shut down the instance, I'd be screwed, it seems. -jwb
