Gordon Shannon <gordo169(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> Bingo. Yes it is reasonable. It was 25 seconds between my altering the
> index in question and the server crash.
Sounds like we have a smoking gun. Could you show all your non-default
postgresql.conf settings on the master? I'm wondering about
full_page_writes in particular, but might as well gather all the
relevant data while we're at it. Easiest way is:
select name,setting from pg_settings where source not in ('default','override');
regards, tom lane