Postmaster won't -HUP

Hello out there,

I'm having a problem with a production server. Actually, there are two
problems. The semi-trivial problem is that Postgres won't die using the
service mechanism. As root, I "service postgres stop" and then "service
postgres start" after a reasonable wait. The restart will earn me a
"StreamServerPort: cannot bind to port" which indicates tht the process
never died. A ps ax confirms the persistance of postmaster. When I kill -9
the processes (postmaster, the /bin/sh -c postgres, and logger) they
process will claim to start with "service postgres start" but it reports no
PID and doesn't show up in ps ax. It is clearly not running at this point.

The real problem, which caused all this debugging, is that twice so far,
for no apparent reason, I have pegged the processors on the server. The
machine has two 500mHz processors with 256 MB ram. I have a hard time
believing that one small query can bring that machine to its knees, but it
has, twice. The queries were run through a hard coded php front end (for
testing purposes). Any insight on these two problems would be appreciated
greatly.

thanks,

Jerry Lynde

Jerry Lynde
IT - Invocation/Evocation, Banishing, et al.
"In E-commerce, the E stands for Evil."
Due Diligence Inc.
http://www.diligence.com
Phone: (406) 728-0001 x232
Fax: (406) 728-0006