2 18.5. Shutting Down the Server #
4 There are several ways to shut down the database server. Under the
5 hood, they all reduce to sending a signal to the supervisor postgres
8 If you are using a pre-packaged version of PostgreSQL, and you used its
9 provisions for starting the server, then you should also use its
10 provisions for stopping the server. Consult the package-level
11 documentation for details.
13 When managing the server directly, you can control the type of shutdown
14 by sending different signals to the postgres process:
17 This is the Smart Shutdown mode. After receiving SIGTERM, the
18 server disallows new connections, but lets existing sessions end
19 their work normally. It shuts down only after all of the
20 sessions terminate. If the server is in recovery when a smart
21 shutdown is requested, recovery and streaming replication will
22 be stopped only after all regular sessions have terminated.
25 This is the Fast Shutdown mode. The server disallows new
26 connections and sends all existing server processes SIGTERM,
27 which will cause them to abort their current transactions and
28 exit promptly. It then waits for all server processes to exit
29 and finally shuts down.
32 This is the Immediate Shutdown mode. The server will send
33 SIGQUIT to all child processes and wait for them to terminate.
34 If any do not terminate within 5 seconds, they will be sent
35 SIGKILL. The supervisor server process exits as soon as all
36 child processes have exited, without doing normal database
37 shutdown processing. This will lead to recovery (by replaying
38 the WAL log) upon next start-up. This is recommended only in
41 The pg_ctl program provides a convenient interface for sending these
42 signals to shut down the server. Alternatively, you can send the signal
43 directly using kill on non-Windows systems. The PID of the postgres
44 process can be found using the ps program, or from the file
45 postmaster.pid in the data directory. For example, to do a fast
47 $ kill -INT `head -1 /usr/local/pgsql/data/postmaster.pid`
51 It is best not to use SIGKILL to shut down the server. Doing so will
52 prevent the server from releasing shared memory and semaphores.
53 Furthermore, SIGKILL kills the postgres process without letting it
54 relay the signal to its subprocesses, so it might be necessary to kill
55 the individual subprocesses by hand as well.
57 To terminate an individual session while allowing other sessions to
58 continue, use pg_terminate_backend() (see Table 9.96) or send a SIGTERM
59 signal to the child process associated with the session.