Re: Odd corruption issue reported on dba.stackexchange.com, need advice

On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 3:16 AM, Craig Ringer <ringerc(at)ringerc(dot)id(dot)au> wrote:

> It shouldn't matter - only PostgreSQL was restarted, not the whole machine
>> - and cleanly at that. Very strange.
>
>
> look at pg_ctlcluster, (which does the restart):

if (!fork()) {
close STDOUT;
exec $pg_ctl, '-D', $info{'pgdata'}, '-s', '-w', '-m', 'fast',
@pg_ctl_opts_from_cli, 'stop';
} else {
wait;
$result = $? >> 8;
}

# try harder if "fast" mode does not work
if (-f $info{'pgdata'}.'/postmaster.pid') {
print "(does not shutdown gracefully, now stopping
immediately)\n";
$result = system $pg_ctl, '-D', $info{'pgdata'}, '-s', '-w',
'-m', 'immediate', @pg_ctl_opts_from_cli, 'stop';
}

# if that still not helps, use the big hammer
if (-f $info{'pgdata'}.'/postmaster.pid') {
print "(does not shutdown, killing the process)";
$pid = get_running_pid $info{'pgdata'}.'/postmaster.pid';
kill (9, $pid) if $pid;
unlink $info{'pgdata'}.'/postmaster.pid';
$result = 0;
}

Could the "big hammer mode" be what's killed the database?

Greetings
Marcin