Re: Postgres will not shutdown?

On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 8:22 AM, Carol Walter <walterc(at)indiana(dot)edu> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I've had a number of problems with Postgres in passed few days. First ,I
> had an issue with a corrupt index. One solution required that I stop and
> start postgres so it would read the postgresql.conf file. It looked like it
> was stopping but it wasn't. I finally had to kill the processes. The
> problem was that postgres didn't thing the pg_ctl was running. Then I
> realized I had not set the parameter that I needed to set quite high enough
> so I had to stop and restart it again. It didn't stop again but this time I
> got the following message:
>
> # /etc/init.d/cswpostgres stop
> Stopping PostgreSQL database...
> waiting for server to shut
> down............................................................... failed
> pg_ctl: server does not shut down
>
> Can anyone help unravel this?

more than likely your initscript is calling pg_ctl -D datadir stop

In pg_ctl there's a -m switch with 3 args that can let you stop
postgresql faster. The three args are smart, fast, and immediate.
Smart, the default waits for the clients to disconnect, fast
disconnects the clients, which rolls back their transactions, then
shuts down pg, Immediate kills all the postgres backends and requires
that the db recover on restart.