To: Wells Oliver <woliver@padres.com>
cc: pgsql-admin@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: 8.4 process killed- what sort of recovery options do I have? 
In-reply-to: <6BDF410DD500E841A60A6D183F26E26E096BB9D2@svrmailbe2.padres.com> 
References: <6BDF410DD500E841A60A6D183F26E26E096BB9D2@svrmailbe2.padres.com>
Comments: In-reply-to Wells Oliver <woliver@padres.com>
	message dated "Thu, 18 Nov 2010 09:42:49 -0800"
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2010 13:04:13 -0500
Message-ID: <4067.1290103453@sss.pgh.pa.us>
From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

Wells Oliver <woliver@padres.com> writes:
> For whatever reason- investigations still pending- the postgres process
> froze up and I had to do a killall b/c pg_ctlcluster would not revive
> the thing. Everything seems to be in working order, but I'd like to know
> if there's any kind of consistency check I should run in light of
> events. Also, what's the best way to track down the reason for the
> crash? Just get into /var/log/postgresql and poke around?

I don't think you need to worry about your data.  Crash recovery is a
well-tested aspect of Postgres ;-).  As for figuring out what happened,
did you force core dumps?  Stack traces from the dumps would be most
useful.

			regards, tom lane