"BJ Taylor" <btaylor@propertysolutions.com> writes:
> We are using version 8.3.1. And to be precise, when I started the vacuum
> (analyze), I started it as a cron job to run daily around midnight. The
> next day I came in and checked on it and it was still running. Not thinking
> that it would take more than a full 24 hours to run, I let it be, and the
> next day I came in and the server started acting weird. I believe the
> vacuum process continued to run, and a second vacuum process was started.
> The server became unstable, and refused incoming connections.
Unstable how? What error did you get on the refused connections? What
was showing up in the postmaster log?
> At which
> point, I killed all vacuum processes, and restarted postgresql.
How did you do that killing exactly?
> I believe
> it was somewhere during this process that the database became corrupted. I
> am not certain what happens when two vacuum processes run at the same time.
Nothing of interest, it's done all the time.
> That may have been the problem, or it may not have. Or it may have been
> that I killed the vacuum process in the middle of what it was doing. One
> way or another, the problem that we have now, is that we are unable to get a
> dump of the database for backups, and the database seems less stable than it
> was previously (dropping connections, and refusing connections seemingly at
> random).
Again, what errors are you getting exactly, and what shows up in the
postmaster log?
regards, tom lane