Tom,
> The zombies couldn't be dead backends if the postmaster has gone away:
> in every Unix I know, a zombie process disappears instantly if its
> parent dies (since the only reason for a zombie in the first place
> is to hold the process' exit status until the parent reads it with
> wait()).
yeah, I think I spoke too soon. What it looks like is that pg_ctl is
reporting success while actually failing to shut down the postmaster.
Solaris makes it a little hard to read; parent-process relationships aren't
as clear as they are in Linux.
--
--Josh
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco