Re: Stats Collector Oddity

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us (Tom Lane) wrote:
> Chris Browne <cbbrowne@acm.org> writes:
>> There isn't any way, short of restarting the postmaster, to get rid of
>> that PID, is there?
>
> The entry will get overwritten when that BackendId slot gets re-used,
> so just starting enough concurrent backends should do it.  (Since
> incoming backends always take the lowest free slot, the fact that the
> dead entry has persisted awhile means that it must have a number higher
> than your normal number of concurrent sessions ... which is evidence
> in favor of the idea that it happened during a load spike ...)

Cool.  I started up a nice little bunch of psql sessions in the
background, and then once they were all up, shut down my shell
session, thereby eliminating them.  And that did, indeed, clear out
that pg_stat_activity entry.

... And five minutes later, Nagios sent me message indicating that
node had recovered from having an "ancient" open connection.

I'll re-add a few gratuitous details here in the hopes that that makes
this easily findable if anyone else should search for the issue...

The Problem:- pg_stat_activity was reporting an elderly transaction in progress
- that backend process wasn't running anymore
- pg_stat_activity *was* reporting other legitimate activity; this  was not the scenario where it had gotten deranged
(normallydue to  excessive load)
 
- Per Tom's comments, there evidently *was* some load spike where  the closing of this particular connection did not
getlogged by  the stats collector
 

The Solution: 
- We needed to roll the stats collector through a bunch of its slots  in order to clean the apparently-still-populated
entryout.
 
- Ran, in a shell:    for i in `seq 100`; do        psql &    done
  That left 100 psql sessions in the background, all connected to the  database backend.
- Closed the shell.  That then HUPped the 100 psql sessions.

That got the offending pg_stat_activity entry cleared out.
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