Re: defunct postmasters

Philip Crotwell <crotwell(at)seis(dot)sc(dot)edu> writes:
> I am running postgres7.1 on redhat 6.2 and my database has gone belly up.

> I know i am not supposed to "kill -9 " the postmaster, but it has become
> completely unresponsive. pgsql just hangs as does stopping with the
> rc.d script.

Actually, kill -9 should be perfectly safe in PG 7.1; it was only
earlier releases that didn't like it. But before you do that,
would you attach to the top postmaster process (29214) with gdb
and get a stack trace?

> PS I don't know why this happened, but the only theory I have is that I am
> running with -i to allow jdbc connections and I had port scanned the
> machine with nmap shortly before noticing that I could no longer connect.

Hmm, would you see if that's repeatable?

regards, tom lane