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Message-ID: <dcc563d10804220813m21facfbfx17ab52a0e1de2743@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2008 09:13:09 -0600
From: "Scott Marlowe" <scott.marlowe@gmail.com>
To: "Hajek, Nick" <Nick.Hajek@vishay.com>
Subject: Re: Server Crash
Cc: pgsql-admin@postgresql.org
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 <AFD16ED07E37C64D963DA24840AA31F203524511@EVSCO01.na.vishayint.com>
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References: 
 <AFD16ED07E37C64D963DA24840AA31F203524511@EVSCO01.na.vishayint.com>

On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 8:14 AM, Hajek, Nick <Nick.Hajek@vishay.com> wrote:
>
>
> All,
> We experienced a crash of a Postgresql server which from the log appears to
> have began with this entry:
>
> Log:  background writer process (PID 3457) was terminated by signal 9

Kill -9 is the "shoot it in the head" signal.  It is not generated by
postgresql in normal operation.  It can be generated by "pg_ctl -m
immediate stop" .  At least I think that's what signal it sends.

Anyway, the most common cause of kill -9s randomly showing up in linux
is the OOM killer.

It's quite possible you're running your machine out of memory / swap
somehow and linux is killing the biggest, fattest process it can find,
which is pgsql.

you might wanna run vmstat 1 to see what's happening during these times.