On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 4:44 PM, David Kerr<dmk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > What's the generally accepted method for killing processes that went 'all wacky' in postgres? > > I think i've seen in this group that kill -INT would be the way to go. > > I'm playing around with different options for a median function. this one got out of hand > and was taking too long, so i wanted to kill it: > > test=# select array_median(array(select t1 from test2 order by 1)); > ^CCancel request sent > > It just sits there, it's been trying to die for 1/2 an hour. > > At the OS it's taking up 100% of the CPU. > > I tried kill -INT <pid> but that didn't help. > > It's not updating anything, and i'm the only one in the database. > > Fortunatly it's not production, so I don't really care. But if it was production, what would > be the method to kill it? (I know about kill -9, i'm assuming that == bad) > > If this were production, I'd need to end the process, force a rollback (if necessary) and get > my CPU back so "just waiting for it to die" really isn't an option... > > (PostgreSQL 8.3.5, linux/SLES11) What's most likely happening is that it's stuck in a tight loop that doesn't check for interrupts, so it just keeps on going. You can kill -9 a process. It'll cause the postmaster to kill all backends and flush the buffers if I remember correctly. Yeah, not the ideal solution in production but on a non-prod machine it's an ok way to get out of these issues. And even in production, it's often much faster to kill -9 a single process than to wait for it to finish. I think there might be choices other than -9 here, but I can't recall them off the top of my head. -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
