On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 1:53 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Scott Marlowe <scott.marlowe@gmail.com> writes:
>> On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 1:18 PM, Yann ROBIN <me.show@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> kill -9 of the writer process
>
>> Are you sure you killed all the postgres backends before restarting
>> the server? If other backends are still running, with a dead
>> postmaster, and you restart the server, instant corruption.
>
> There are interlocks against that ... although if you were foolish
> enough to manually remove postmaster.pid, you could defeat them :-(
I've had to remove it once or twice in the past (has that behavior
changed in more recent versions, where it's smarter about it?) but I
knew to check for orphaned backends as well. If someone did and
didn't respectively then they'd definitely be seeing odd behaviour and
a corrupted database.