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