Heikki Linnakangas <heikki.linnakangas@enterprisedb.com> writes:
> Marko Kreen wrote:
>> Without reset in ProcArrayRemove we may use some ancient pointer that
>> may point to garbage? I don't think it's good coding style to allow
>> that to happen.
> Well, that can happen anyway. CountActiveBackends() could fetch the
> pointer and determine that it's not NULL, just before ProcArrayRemove
> clears it.
Dead PGPROC entries are just put into a list for reuse, so the pointer
would still point at storage that looked like a PGPROC. I concur with
Heikki's theory that the observed crash must have been from fetching a
pointer that was never yet not NULL.
regards, tom lane