Re: pg_ctl/pg_rewind tests vs. slow AIX buildfarm members

On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 7:41 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> So there's still something to be desired on Windows; but it's still
> better than before in that we can reliably detect child process exit
> instead of having to use the five-second heuristic.  And of course on
> Unix this is way better than before.
>
> So I've pushed this with some cosmetic adjustments, as well as the not
> so cosmetic adjustment of making the service-start path also use handle
> testing.  If there are remaining problems, the buildfarm should tell us.

Thanks! I used at some point when hacking postmasterProcess as well to
save the handle but for clarity as this was already used for shutdown
when running things as a service of the Windows SCM I put that in
another variable. So far so good based on some extra testing I just
did now.

> I'm not sure if this will completely fix our problems with "pg_ctl start"
> related buildfarm failures on very slow critters.  It does get rid of the
> hard wired 5-second timeout, but the 60-second timeout could still be an
> issue.  I think Noah was considering a patch to allow that number to be
> raised.  I'd be in favor of letting pg_ctl accept a default timeout length
> from an environment variable, and then the slower critters could be fixed
> by adjusting their buildfarm configurations.

Being able to pass that as a command-line parameter (master-only
change) would be welcome as well IMO.
-- 
Michael