Re: Question about debugging bootstrapping and catalog entries

Gregory Stark <stark@enterprisedb.com> writes:
> Hm, I suppose. Though starting a second gdb is a pain. What I've done in the
> past is introduce a usleep(30000000) in strategic points in the backend to
> give me a chance to attach.

There is already an option to sleep early in backend startup for the
normal case.  Not sure if it works for bootstrap, autovacuum, etc,
but I could see making it do so.  The suggestion of single-stepping
initdb will only work well if you have a version of gdb that can step
into a fork, which is something that's never worked for me :-(.
Otherwise the backend will free-run until it blocks waiting for input
from initdb, which means you are still stuck for debugging startup
crashes ...
        regards, tom lane