Re: Dealing with network-dead clients

Oliver Jowett wrote:
> I'm currently trying to find a clean way to deal with network-dead 
> clients that are in a transaction and holding locks etc.
> 
> The normal "client closes socket" case works fine. The scenario I'm 
> worried about is when the client machine falls off the network entirely 
> for some reason (ethernet problem, kernel panic, machine catches 
> fire..). From what I can see, if the connection is idle at that point, 
> the server won't notice this until TCP-level SO_KEEPALIVE kicks in, 
> which by default takes over 2 hours on an idle connection. I'm looking 
> for something more like a 30-60 second turnaround if the client is 
> holding locks.

> 3) implement an idle timeout on the server so that open transactions 
> that are idle for longer than some period are automatically aborted.

> (3) seems like a proper solution. I've searched the archives a bit and 
> transaction timeouts have been suggested before, but there seems to be 
> some resistance to them.

Have you come across the pgpool connection-pooling project? 
http://pgpool.projects.postgresql.org/

Might be easier to put a timeout+disconnect in there.

--  Richard Huxton  Archonet Ltd