Re: What (not) to do in signal handlers

> I notice that the signal handlers in postmaster.c do quite a lot of work,
> much more than what they teach you in school they should do.  While
> fprintf, elog, and ctime may simply lead to annoyances, forking off the
> WAL helper processes seems to be quite a lot.
> 
> ISTM that most of these, esp. pmdie(), can be written more like the SIGHUP
> handler, i.e., set a global variable and evaluate right after the
> select().  This would at least give me a better feeling when I send "Fast
> Shutdown request at %s" etc. through elog(), which is what they should do
> for consistent message formatting.

Agreed.  If we don't loop around to check the variable soon we have
bigger problems that the signal handlers.

--  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610)
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