Florian Pflug <fgp@phlo.org> writes:
> I don't believe there's one right answer to that.
Right. Force-kill presumes there is only one right answer.
> Assume postgres is driving a website, and the postmaster crashes shortly
> after a pg_dump run started. You probably won't want your website to be
> offline while pg_dump is finishing its backup.
> If, on the other hand, your data warehousing database is running a
> multi-hour query, you might prefer that query to finish, even at the price
> of not being able to accept new connections.
> So maybe there should be a GUC for this?
No need (and rather inflexible anyway). If you don't want an orphaned
backend to continue, you send it SIGTERM.
regards, tom lane