Re: postgres processes not reflected in pg_stat_activity

"Lee, Mija" <mija(at)scharp(dot)org> writes:
> Again, 5 extra processes. 6939 is one example. I'm not sure what you are looking for from this command that is different from ps -ef?
> Update_process_title is turned on.

5 extra processes would be exactly what I'd expect in an 8.3
installation. I don't remember the magic incantation to get Solaris'
ps to show you useful descriptions, but on most platforms what you'd
see is something like this:

postgres 8522 1 0 13:37:37 pts/2 0:00 postmaster
postgres 8525 8522 0 13:37:37 ? 0:00 postgres: writer process
postgres 8526 8522 0 13:37:37 ? 0:00 postgres: wal writer process
postgres 8527 8522 0 13:37:37 ? 0:00 postgres: autovacuum launcher process
postgres 8528 8522 0 13:37:37 ? 0:00 postgres: stats collector process

> Any other suggestions are greatly appreciated. I may have to kill these processes because they are eating up memory on this machine, but I would really prefer to know why/what they are before doing so.

You can't kill them without taking down the database. I will bet large
odds that they aren't "eating memory", either --- you have probably got
Postgres' shared memory area set to about 1GB, and you are looking at
the output of tools that report all of that as belonging to each process
that's connected to the shared memory segment.

regards, tom lane