By the way, in spite of my questions and concerns, I was *very* impressed by
the recovery process. I know it might seem like old hat to you guys to watch
the WAL in action, and I know on a theoretical level it's supposed to work, but
watching it recover 150 separate databases, and find and fix a couple of
problems was very impressive. It gives me great confidence that I made the
right choice to use Postgres.
Richard Huxton wrote:
2. Why didn't the database recover? Why are there two processes
that couldn't be killed?
I'm guessing it didn't recover *because* there were two processes that
couldn't be killed. Responsibility for that falls to the
operating-system. I've seen it most often with faulty drivers or
hardware that's being communicated with/written to. However, see below.
It can't be a coincidence that these were the only two processes in a SELECT
operation. Does the server disable signals at critical points?
I'd make a wild guess that this is some sort of deadlock problem -- these two
servers have disabled signals for a critical section of SELECT, and are waiting
for something from the postmaster, but postmaster is dead.
This is an ordinary system, no hardware problems, stock RH FC3 kernel, stock PG
8.1.4, with 4 GB memory, and at the moment the database is running on a single
SATA disk. I'm worried that a production server can get into a state that
requires manual intervention to recover.
Craig
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TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster