On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 7:12 PM, John Cheng <chonger.cheng@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > We had a run away process on our database box that used up all the > physical and all the virtual memory (swap). This caused the RedHat > Linux oom-killer to kill many processes, including some Postgres ones. > Postgres went into a funky state after that time: SNIP > I think the fact that a process used up all the available memory > (physical and virtual) caused Postgres to go into a weird state. Now > it will not respond to kill, or pg_ctl for shutdown. Would the right > thing to do be using kill -9 to stop the server? When you say it won't respond to pg_ctl for shutdown, have you tried the three options for the -m switch in order? Are you running a pretty recent pg version? Which one?
