Hmm. Your last point in particular is one I hadn't considered, yet,
largely because it's not relevant to my current problem. For a more
generalized solution, though, it should definitely be considered.
Does pg_autovacuum currently store the pid of the postmaster against
which it's being run? In fact, how does it know against which
postmaster it's being run? It doesn't take a database as an argument,
does it?
-tfo
On Aug 27, 2004, at 4:47 PM, Matthew T. O'Connor wrote:
> Thomas F.O'Connell wrote:
>> On Aug 27, 2004, at 3:37 PM, Matthew T. O'Connor wrote:
>>> Is there anyway pg_autovacuum can know if the postmaster has
>>> restarted? New PID? Or something better?
>> Hmm. If the above situation is true, does it matter whether
>> pg_autovacuum knows whether the postmaster restarted?
>
> The issue is knowing if you need to launch another pg_autovacuum
> process, you certainly don't want to have two pg_autovacuum processes
> running against the same server.
>
>>>> Is this logic sufficiently sane?
>>>
>>> Well if the script also sends a kill signal to pg_autovacuum that
>>> might solve the pg_autovacuum still running problem.
>> Based on what you say above, though, is it even necessary to kill it?
>> Why not just observe that it's running and fail to start a new one?
>> Unless there's a need to restart pg_autovacuum if postmaster
>> restarts.
>
> Perhaps not as long as you can reliably observe that it's running
> against the newly started postmaster and not another pg_autovacuum
> process running against an entirely separate postmaster process.