Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote: Not possible; the database structure is inherently incorruptible. kill -9 won't do anything to it. You're talking about a database being accessed by only a single process; the lock table is reinitialized whenever a process opens it and no other processes already have it open. As such, no locktable elements from a previous crash will ever affect the running process. Nope. sync is irrelevant for application-level crashes, all the data goes into the OS buffer cache regardless. sync=False will likely leave you a corrupted database if the OS or hardware crashes, but not if the application process crashes. -- -- Howard Chu CTO, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc/ Chief Architect, OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/project/