On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 7:12 PM, John Cheng <chonger.cheng@gmail.com> wrote:
> We had a run away process on our database box that used up all the
> physical and all the virtual memory (swap). This caused the RedHat
> Linux oom-killer to kill many processes, including some Postgres ones.
> Postgres went into a funky state after that time:
SNIP
> I think the fact that a process used up all the available memory
> (physical and virtual) caused Postgres to go into a weird state. Now
> it will not respond to kill, or pg_ctl for shutdown. Would the right
> thing to do be using kill -9 to stop the server?
When you say it won't respond to pg_ctl for shutdown, have you tried
the three options for the -m switch in order? Are you running a
pretty recent pg version? Which one?