Thanks to the great suggestions I've at least gotten it to not hang...
Martijn's hint about blocking led me to open up those filehandles in a
non-blocking mode. It appears that write() will write, at a maximum, only 4096
bytes when it is called from within PostgreSQL. I've tried to push data into it
in <=4096-byte slugs, but after 4096 bytes it just won't take anymore. Since (I
think) using a non-blocking mode could cause problems with thread safety, it's
probably a lost cause.
I'm new to C, so this may seem extremely naive: I'm not sure how to use exec()
to solve this problem. Could you give me a few pointers to get me started?
--- Douglas McNaught <doug@mcnaught.org> wrote:
> Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> writes:
>
> > The things that have screwed me up in the past with pulling tricks like
> > this are:
> >
> > 1. Program has registered atexit() handlers. _exit() avoids this.
> > 2. Pending stdio output that gets flushed. The backend doesn't use
> > stdio much so you might be fine here.
> > 3. Signals. Make sure you don't get sent signals that screw state.
> > Might be wise to block them all, or reset them all to default.
> >
> > Truly, exec() is the cleanest way to solve all this, it simply replaces
> > the current process, lock, stock and barrel.
>
> Definitely. It would probably also be good to close all file
> descriptors (except for stdin/etdout/stderr) before exec(), just in
> case the other binary does something screwy with random file
> descriptors (which it obviously shouldn't).
>
> -Doug
>
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
>
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