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

Tom Lane wrote:
> Lamar Owen wrote:
> > Postmaster can easily enough find out if zombie backends are 'out there'
> > during startup, right?
> If you think it's easy enough, enlighten the rest of us ;-).

If postgres reported PGDATA on the command line it would be easy enough.

> > What can postmaster _do_ about it, though?  It
> > won't necessarily be able to kill them -- but it also can't control
> > them.  If it _can_ kill them, should it try?
> I think refusal to start is sufficient.  They should go away by
> themselves as their clients disconnect, and forcing the issue doesn't

???? I have misunderstood your previous statement about not wanting to
force a manual crash recovery, then.

> > Should a set of backends detect a new postmaster coming up and try to
> > 'sync up' with that postmaster,
> Nice try ;-).  How will you persuade the kernel that these processes are
> now children of the new postmaster?

Yeah, that's the kicker.
--
Lamar Owen
WGCR Internet Radio
1 Peter 4:11