On Thu, Feb 26, 2004 at 17:09:21 -0500, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> "Simon Riggs" <simon@2ndquadrant.com> writes:
> > Should we have a pgmon process that watches the postmaster
> > and restarts it if required?
>
> I doubt it; in practice the postmaster is *very* reliable (because it
> doesn't do much), and so I'm not sure that adding a watchdog is going to
> increase the net reliability of the system. The sorts of things that
> could take out the postmaster are likely to take out a watchdog too.
Running postgres under daemontools is an easy way to accomplish this.
The one case it won't handle is if some process gets the process id
from the old postgres process before the new one starts up.