Re: postmaster.pid disappeared

Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com> writes:
> Looking at his report, what's happening is that the postmaster is shutting 
> down, but the other backends are not ... they're hanging around as
> zombies.

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()).

> Not sure why, but I'm chatting with him on IRC.

Find out what the parent process of the zombies actually is.
        regards, tom lane