I noticed while doing some debugging this morning that if the postmaster
crashes for some reason (eg kill -9) the bgwriter process never goes
away. Backends will eventually exit when their clients quit, and the
stats collection processes shut down nicely, but the bgwriter process
has to be killed by hand. This doesn't seem like a real good thing.
Maybe there should be a provision similar to the stats collector's
check-for-read-ready-from-a-pipe?
regards, tom lane