Re: killing idle attaches without killing others

On 4 August 2010 15:18, Vick Khera <vivek@khera.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 10:03 AM, Gauthier, Dave <dave.gauthier@intel.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> How can one kill just the <IDLE> processes I see attached to a DB (from
>> pg_stat_activity) without disturbing the others?  If I need to kill the idle
>> pids one ata time, which signal_name should I use for that?
>>
>>
>
> Connected to psql as a superuser, issue SELECT pg_cancel_backend(PID); where
> PID is the pid of the process to close.

That's a SIGINT, but it doesn't actually kill the process, it just
cancels it's current query.

pg_terminate_backend() sends a SIGTERM to terminate the backend. I
think that function is new to 8.4, but you can still manually send the
signal if you're on 8.3.

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/functions-admin.html

Regards,
Dean