Sebastien Boisvert <sebastienboisv...@yahoo.com> writes: > Is this mechanism documented anywhere (besides source code)?
No, not really. > It looks like PG will only clean it up if there's no other process running at > all on the pid listed in the postmaster.pid file, even if any process running > on that pid isn't a PG process or there's no server running on the data > directory (as per `pg_ctl status`). Not sure what you're looking at, but the above is wrong in at least one critical detail, namely that there's a process-ownership check via kill(). There are also checks to ensure no children of the previous postmaster are still alive. These are not things you want to lightly bypass: two sets of postmaster children running against the same data directory *will* result in unrecoverable data corruption. If you're trying to claim you've seen a false-positive situation, it would be interesting to hear actual details. regards, tom lane -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general