Re: How to shoot yourself in the foot: kill -9 postmaster

* Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> [010306 10:35] wrote:
> Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net> writes:
> 
> > What about encoding the shm id in the pidfile?  Then one can just ask
> > how many processes are attached to that segment?  (if it doesn't
> > exist, one can assume all backends have exited)
> 
> Hmm ... that might actually be a pretty good idea.  A small problem is
> that the shm key isn't yet selected at the time we initially create the
> lockfile, but I can't think of any reason that we could not go back and
> append the key to the lockfile afterwards.
> 
> > you want the field 'shm_nattch'
> 
> Are there any portability problems with relying on shm_nattch to be
> available?  If not, I like this a lot...

Well it's available on FreeBSD and Solaris, I'm sure Redhat has
some deamon that resets the value to 0 periodically just for kicks
so it might not be viable... :)

Seriously, there's some dispute on the type that 'shm_nattch' is,
under Solaris it's "shmatt_t" (unsigned long afaik), under FreeBSD
it's 'short' (i should fix this. :)).

But since you're really only testing for 0'ness then it shouldn't
really be a problem.

-- 
-Alfred Perlstein - [bright@wintelcom.net|alfred@freebsd.org]