"Chad R. Larson" <clarson@eldocomp.com> writes:
> We're running PostgreSQL as a backend to a J2SE server (with Macromedia
> JRun instead of Tomcat). When we converted our Sun Enterprise servers into
> a cluster (Veritas VCS) we had similar problems. We were using the "fast"
> option on a shutdown, but switchover in the cluster would hang until we
> changed the "fast" to "immediate". We'd prefer "fast", but it does not
> seem to work exactly as documented.
> Solaris 2.6, PostgreSQL 7.1.2, VCS 1.1.
Hmm. Could you look into it and figure out *why* it didn't work?
It's possible that this Solaris configuration has the same kind of
kernel bug that was recently reported against Mac OSX 10.1: normal
postmaster shutdown fails during system shutdown because fork()
stops working, thus the postmaster cannot launch a checkpoint subprocess
to clean up. (I'm not certain that fork itself is the issue in OSX,
but the behavior was definitely that the checkpoint subprocess never
got dispatched, even though the postmaster got a success return from
fork...)
regards, tom lane