Ian Lance Taylor <ian@airs.com> writes:
> Any thoughts on a cleaner solution?
> One way to avoid this race condition is to set a timeout on the
> select. What is the maximum acceptable time for a timely response?
I thought about that, but it doesn't seem like a cleaner solution.
Basically you'd have to figure a tradeoff between wasted cycles in
the postmaster and time delay to respond to a crashed backend.
And there's no good tradeoff there. If you have a backend crash,
you want to shut down the other backends ASAP, before they have a
chance to propagate any shared-memory corruption that the failed
backend might've created. The entire exercise is probably pointless
if the postmaster twiddles its thumbs for awhile before killing the
other backends.
regards, tom lane