> On Feb 25, 2015, at 3:27 PM, Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
>
> Tong Pham wrote:
>
>> We do have fsync turned on, and there was no disk failure. The database
>> had to be shut down forcefully because it was becoming nonresponsive
>> (probably due to inadequate earlier vacuuming) and we could not get the
>> remaining queries to terminate with normal cancel/terminate operations (so
>> a SIGKILL was used ‹ which was bad.)
FWIW, when the server isn’t responding to pg_cancel_backend()/pt_terminate_backend() processes will typically go away if you directly issue a SIGTERM from the system, e.g. `kill <pid>` from bash or whatever.