Excerpts from Robert Haas's message of vie dic 17 14:08:04 -0300 2010:
> I'm having a bit of trouble confirming this on MacOS X, though.
> Attaching gdb to either the startup process or a WAL sender causes
> PostmasterIsAlive to return false, resulting in a near-immediate exit.
> Seems pretty stupid for attaching gdb to change the return value of
> getppid() but it seems like that must be what's happening.
Yeah, this problem has been known for some time and causes quite some
pain. We have an open problem report on autovacuum failing to run after
some time, and we haven't been able to get a backtrace or strace because
of this issue -- trying to attach to it causes a full system restart
(PostmasterIsAlive returns false, autovac launcher dies, this death
causes postmaster to shut everything down and restart). This is on
FreeBSD.
--
Álvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com>
The PostgreSQL Company - Command Prompt, Inc.
PostgreSQL Replication, Consulting, Custom Development, 24x7 support