Re: Log notice that checkpoint is to be written on shutdown

Hi,

Am Donnerstag, den 02.10.2014, 15:21 +0200 schrieb Michael Banck:
> we have seen repeatedly that users can be confused about why PostgreSQL
> is not shutting down even though they requested it.  Usually, this is
> because `log_checkpoints' is not enabled and the final checkpoint is
> being written, delaying shutdown. As no message besides "shutting down"
> is written to the server log in this case, we even had users believing
> the server was hanging and pondering killing it manually.

There were some comments that this might not actually be the case and/or
that the postmaster was simply waiting for clients to disconnect due to
smart shutdown being invoked.

About the former, it might be possible to hook into the checkpoint code
and try to estimate how much I/O is to be written, and decide on some
threshold above which a warning is issued, but this looks rather fragile
so I won't try to tackle it now.

About the latter, this is a valid concern, and I decided to add a
WARNING in this case (if normal clients are connected), thus moving into
the "additional logging on shutdown" territory.

The other point was changing the default shutdown method and/or the
default for the log_checkpoints parameter.  The former has not been
discussed much and the latter was contentious - I won't touch those
either.  And even if the defaults are changed, old installations might
still carry the old defaults or DBAs might change them for whatever
reasons, so ISTM additional logging is rather orthogonal to that.

Finally, I am not convinced changing the pg_ctl logging is worthwhile.

I have updated the initial patch with the following: (i) the message got
changed to mention that this is a shutdown checkpoint, (ii) the end of
the shutdown checkpoint is logged as well and (iii) if normal clients
are connected during smart shutdown, a warning is logged.

I'll attach it to the next commitfest and see whether anybody likes it.


Michael

--
Michael Banck
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