Re: pg_ctl stop failure

It is not necessary to shutdown the database to take a filesystem level
backup. you might consider to use

pg_start_backup()

cp ...

pg_stop_backup()

Take a look at the documentation for further details

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/static/functions-admin.html

regards

Andreas

On 05/17/2013 05:00 PM, Amit Langote wrote:
> On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 10:47 PM, Birchall, Austen
> <austen(dot)birchall(at)metoffice(dot)gov(dot)uk> wrote:
>> 8.4.13 & PostGIS 2.0 on Red Hat 6
>>
>> I want to do a offline backup of /var/lib/pgsql/data
>>
>> But whenever I do
>>
>> Pg_ctl stop
>>
>> I get
>>
>> -bash-4.1$ pg_ctl stop
>> waiting for server to shut down............................................................... failed
>> pg_ctl: server does not shut down
>>
> This means you have clients connected to the database and server won't
> shut down until all the clients have disconnected.
>
>> 1. If I do
>>
>> pg_ctl stop -m f
>>
>> the cluster and databases shutdown as required but is this a clean and/or consistent shutdown of the cluster in the sense that I could recover from the OS
>>
> "-m f " mode disconnects those clients for you. pg_ctl Documentation
> at http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/static/app-pg-ctl.html
> says:
> "Fast" mode does not wait for clients to disconnect and will terminate
> an online backup in progress. All active transactions are rolled back
> and clients are forcibly disconnected, then the server is shut down.
>
> So what you have is a consistent shut down with incomplete
> transactions rolled back. By the way, could you see any active
> connections while you tried stopping the server?
>
> --
> Amit Langote
>
>