I notice that in 8.3, when I kill the postmaster process with SIGKILL or SIGSEGV, the child processes writer and stats collector go away immediately, but the autovacuum launcher hangs around for up to a minute. (I suppose this has to do with the periodic wakeups?). When you try to restart the postmaster before that it fails with a complaint that someone is still attached to the shared memory segment.
These are obviously not normal modes of operation, but I fear that this could cause some problems with people's control scripts of the sort, "it crashed, let's try to restart it". -- Peter Eisentraut http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/ ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org