surabhi.ahuja wrote:
The exact message i saw is this: LOG: received fast shutdown request LOG: aborting any active transactions FATAL: terminating connection due to administrator command so does this mean that someone is trying to stop postmaster by sending it a kill signal?
Someone or something. It can be Linux's out-of-memory facility picking processes to kill. Google "oom killer" for discussion. It would need to be sent from the postgres user or root though (or a process running as them).
i also have these questions: 1. many times i have seen two instances of postmaster running. how does that happen and how to prevent it from happening?
Shouldn't (unless you have two installations of course). You shouldn't have to do anything to prevent it from happening. Try and capture details of the processes with "ps aux" and "pstree" if you can.
2. into the logfile (which i specify at the time of starting postmaster), i want to add timestamps, for each log/warning etc. How do i do that?
See the manuals for details - run-time environment / error reporting and logging.
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/ -- Richard Huxton Archonet Ltd