From: Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>
Message-Id: <200206051633.g55GXm718101@candle.pha.pa.us>
Subject: Re: Further info : Very high load average but no cpu utilization
In-Reply-To: <20020513102120.6BB3C1AFD@druid.net>
To: pgsql-sql@postgresql.org
Date: Wed, 5 Jun 2002 12:33:48 -0400 (EDT)
Cc: "Rajesh Kumar Mallah." <mallah@trade-india.com>,
	Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
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D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote:
> On May 13, 2002 12:50 am, Rajesh Kumar Mallah. wrote:
> > Its advocated "dont kill -9 the postmaster" and i rarely do that.
> 
> Advocated or not, kill -9 is supposed to be the last resort.  If nothing else 
> works then kill -9 should kill any Unix process.  As Tom says, if it doesn't 
> then it suggests an OS (probably driver) problem.
> 
> Now if only I could get IBM to understand that.  They still claim that my 
> problem is that PostgreSQL (an "unsupported" application) is doing something 
> to catch SIGKILL.

First, an application can't catch SIGKILL. It never arrives to
applications.  It is supposed to pull the process with no warning.

However, there are things processes can do to wedge themselves in a
system call so they don't see the SIGKILL.  Of course, as soon as they
return from the system call, they die.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
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