Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 8:10 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> Florian Pflug <fgp@phlo.org> writes:
>>> 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.
> It is not easy to make this work in such a way that you can ensure a
> clean, automatic restart of PostgreSQL after a postmaster death.
> Which is what at least some people want.
True. It strikes me also that the postmaster does provide some services
other than accepting new connections:
* ensuring that everybody gets killed if a backend crashes
* respawning autovac launcher and other processes that might exit
harmlessly
* is there still any cross-backend signaling that goes through the
postmaster? We got rid of the sinval case, but I don't recall if
there's others.
While you could probably live without these in the scenario of "let my
honking big query finish before restarting", you would not want to do
without them in unattended operation.
regards, tom lane