On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 7:56 PM, John Cheng <chonger.cheng@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I am running postgresql 8.3, I was not aware of the 3 options (smart, > fast, or immediate). So it used the default - "fast". > > The state of the server when I sent this e-mail was that there were > two remaining connections/postgres subprocesses. I used kill -9 to > stop those two subprocesses. Then postgres was able to stop normally. > After that, I restarted postgresql normally and it went into recovery > mode for about 30 seconds. After that, it started to behave normally > again. Yeah, there's some danger in kill -9 to the postgres processes, but I've had to killall -9 -f postgres once or twice in the distant past. The -m immediate is the signal just this side of kill -9, forget the name. You should be ok. Definitely look into what's causing the oom killer to come out and play, and look at turning off overcommit (I think the setting is 2 to turn it off)
