Re: could not read block 77 of relation 1663/16385/388818775

From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
To: Heikki Linnakangas <heikki(dot)linnakangas(at)enterprisedb(dot)com>
Cc: Craig Ringer <craig(at)postnewspapers(dot)com(dot)au>, Alexandra Nitzschke <an(at)clickware(dot)de>, pgsql-bugs(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: could not read block 77 of relation 1663/16385/388818775
Date: 2008-11-20 20:26:49
Message-ID: 7377.1227212809@sss.pgh.pa.us
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Heikki Linnakangas <heikki(dot)linnakangas(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
> Craig Ringer wrote:
>> Is there any chance you have EVER hard-killed the postmaster manually
>> (eg with "kill -9" or "kill -KILL")?

> There is safeguards against that. If postmaster dies, the backends
> should die quickly and gracefully too. And postmaster refuses to restart
> until all the backends have died and detached from the shared memory
> segment.

A sufficiently bull-headed DBA can defeat those safeguards though ---
from memory, manually removing postmaster.pid and then starting a new
postmaster while old backends remain alive is the ticket to data
corruption.

regards, tom lane

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