"Craig A. James" <cjames@modgraph-usa.com> writes:
> Bottom line is that I was expecting "instant death" with SIGTERM, but
> instead got an agonizing, drawn out -- but safe -- death of the query.
What was the query exactly?
Our expectation is that all or at least most queries should respond to
SIGINT or SIGTERM interrupts pretty rapidly, say on a less-than-a-second
timescale. However there are various loops in the backend that fail to
execute CHECK_FOR_INTERRUPTS sufficiently often :-(. We've been
gradually finding and fixing these, and will be glad to fix your case
if you provide enough details to pin it down. You might be interested
in this current thread about a similar problem:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-patches/2006-07/msg00039.php
regards, tom lane