"Uwe C. Schroeder" <uwe@oss4u.com> writes:
> NEVER kill -9 a postmaster
> Althoug funny enough it pretty often tolerates that kind of killing, it will
> not allow the process to properly shut down the database. So you may or may
> not be lucky to end up with a good database.
The database is safe enough. What you are likely to have trouble with
is starting a fresh postmaster --- kill -9 prevents the postmaster from
releasing shared memory, for example, and you may not have a high enough
SHMMAX to just go and create another shared memory segment. Do it a few
times in a row and you'll almost surely overrun SHMMAX. This will leave
you having to manually remove the old shared memory, or reboot the
machine, before you can restart Postgres.
Use the documented methods for shutting down Postgres.
regards, tom lane