Seems I had this same problem a while back with 7.2.1
We had I/O problems. Our RAID controller driver was acting up. Upgrading
the i20 driver from Redhat finally and definitively solved the problem.
If you check your processlist, you will see that those "startup"
processes are in an Uninterruptible Sleep mode. We ended up having to
hard reboot the machine to shut down Postgresql. After about a week of
this we found out about the driver.
I would love to hear what your solution was, but am almost sure it is
related to a disk i/o issue.
For others in the list... What does it mean when the Postgresql
processes are in startup mode? What is it supposed to be doing in that
mode?
- Ericson Smith
eric@did-it.com
On Thu, 2002-07-18 at 09:57, Tom Lane wrote:
> "Sam Liddicott" <sam.liddicott@ananova.com> writes:
> > Why are all these processes stuck in startup and taking as much cpu as they
> > can?
>
> You tell us. Attach to a few of them with gdb and get stack traces.
> (It will help if you've built PG with --enable-debug.)
>
> regards, tom lane
>
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster