Markus Wanner <markus@bluegap.ch> writes:
> On 11/17/2010 02:19 PM, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
>> Well, the autovacuum mechanism involves a lot of back-and-forth between
>> launcher and postmaster, which includes some signals, a fork() and
>> backend initialization. The failure possibilities are endless.
>>
>> Fork failure communication is similarly brittle.
> I certainly agree to that. However, a re-connecting mechanism wouldn't
> allow us to get rid of the existing avworker startup infrastructure
> entirely.
I'm afraid that any such change would trade a visible, safe failure
mechanism (no avworker) for invisible, impossible-to-debug data
corruption scenarios (due to failure to reset some bit of cached state).
It certainly won't give me any warm fuzzy feeling that I can trust
autovacuum.
regards, tom lane