On Mon, Feb 27, 2006 at 09:05:51PM -0500, Stock, Stuart wrote: > A few minutes ago, we were surprised to find a second postmaster process > running on our database machine as a child of the original postmaster. The > child postmaster was around for about a minute then disappeared. This is a > Opteron machine running RedHat AS4 with Postgres 8.1.2. > > Does the postmaster process ever spawn a child postmaster? Is this normal? Each connection causes the postmaster to fork a new process to handle that connection. When the connection ends so does that process; that might be what you saw. For more information see the "Monitoring Database Activity" and postmaster documentation: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/interactive/monitoring.html http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/interactive/app-postmaster.html -- Michael Fuhr
