Re: Snapshot synchronization, again...

On Mar 1, 2011, at 10:54 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Jim Nasby <jim@nasby.net> writes:
>> Dumb question: Is this something that could be solved by having the postmaster track this information in it's local
memoryand make it available via a variable-sized IPC mechanism, such as a port or socket? That would eliminate the need
toclean things up after a crash; I'm not sure if there would be other benefits. 
>
> Involving the postmaster in this is entirely *not* reasonable.  The
> postmaster cannot do anything IPC-wise that the stats collector couldn't
> do, and every additional function we load onto the postmaster is another
> potential source of unrecoverable database-wide failures.  The PM is
> reliable only because it doesn't do much.

Makes sense. Doesn't have to be the postmaster; it could be some other process.

Anyway, I just wanted to throw the idea out as food for thought. I don't know if it'd be better or worse than temp
files...
--
Jim C. Nasby, Database Architect                   jim@nasby.net
512.569.9461 (cell)                         http://jim.nasby.net