We have a nightly restart of one PG database. Today it failed and I can't seem to understand why and how to prevent this in the future (nor can I reproduce the problem). We have a line in a shell script that calls "/etc/init.d/postgresql restart". In the shell script's log from this invocation I have: Stopping postgresql service: [FAILED] Starting postgresql service: [ OK ] The outcome of this was that the service was not running (despite the "[ OK ]" on the second line). The query log from that run ends with: 2007-04-23 03:03:59 PDT [23265] LOG: received fast shutdown request 2007-04-23 03:03:59 PDT [23265] LOG: aborting any active transactions 2007-04-23 03:03:59 PDT [26749] FATAL: terminating connection due to administrator command <... snipped more lines like the one above ...> 2007-04-23 03:03:59 PDT [24090] LOG: could not send data to client: Broken pipe 2007-04-23 03:03:59 PDT [26700] FATAL: terminating connection due to administrator command <... snipped more lines like the one above ...> 2007-04-23 03:04:13 PDT [26820] FATAL: the database system is shutting down <... snipped more lines like the one above ...> 2007-04-23 03:06:10 PDT [23269] LOG: shutting down 2007-04-23 03:06:10 PDT [23269] LOG: database system is shut down 2007-04-23 03:06:13 PDT [23267] LOG: logger shutting down <end of log> So it looks like the STOPPING of the service actually succeeded, albeit it took a while (more than the usual sessions open?). The STARTING is the one that actually failed (is that because the STOP was still in process?). The question is why -- in a RESTART situation wouldn't/shouldn't the START part wait for the STOP part to complete (regardless of how long it takes)? Also what can we do to avoid this in the future? We can issue a separate STOP and then a START X minutes later, but how long an X? It would seem that a RESTART is really what I want... TIA, George
