Re: pg_autovacuum start-script

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.