Re: Working happily on 8.1 (Was: panic on 7.3)

Rick Gigger <rick@alpinenetworking.com> writes:
> 2) I didn't touch the Vacuum delay, background writer or autovacuum  
> settings because I wasn't familiar enough with them.  Are the default  
> values very restricting?

By default, autovacuum isn't even turned on --- you have to enable it
and also stats_row_level if you want to use autovac.  I don't have
enough experience with it to say whether the other settings are
adequate.

> 3) Several times there were backends  running that were just bringing  
> down the system.  Is there a way to signal a single backend to die  
> without restarting the whole db server?

SIGINT (ie query cancel) is safe enough.  If that doesn't work within a
few seconds, try SIGTERM (there is controversy over how safe that is,
but people do use it).
        regards, tom lane