Re: [GENERAL] (Never?) Kill Postmaster?

Hi,  

First you need to identify the correct postgresql process. Postgresql spawns an individual server process for each database connection. They look something like this:  

postgres 27296 7089 9 08:00 ? 00:05:52 postgres: username databasename [local] idle  

If a query was running then it would say 'SELECT' instead of 'idle'.  

You can send a SIGINT (ie, -2) to that process to cancel a query, eg  

kill -2 27296  

In most systems SIGINT is the default for kill so you could just do kill <pid>.

The tip is ''kill -9' the postmaster', which has two important differences to the scenario I just described:  

1. kill -9 means the OS kills the process without allowing it to clean up after itself
2. The postmaster is the master postgresql backend process. If you want to kill a single query you would not want to kill that.

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Regards // Mike    

From: Stefan Schwarzer [mailto:stefan.schwarzer@grid.unep.ch] Sent: Wednesday, 24 October 2007 3:58 PM To: pgsql-general@postgresql.org
Subject: (Never?) Kill Postmaster?  

Hi there,  

I read dozens of times the "TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster"...  

Now, what am I supposed to do if I launched a query which takes ages, and which I want to interrupt?  

Thanks for any advice,  

Stef  

  Stefan Schwarzer   

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