On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 3:42 PM, Alvaro Herrera
<alvherre@commandprompt.com> wrote:
>> TBH, I'm very unclear what could cause the postmaster to go belly-up
>> copying a bounded amount of data out of shared memory for logging
>> purposes only. It's surely possible to make the code safe against any
>> sequence of bytes that might be found there.
>
> A mishandled encoding conversion could be problematic, so that needs to
> be carefully considered (perhaps just shut off unconditionally).
It's not really a problem for the postmaster if something just plain
old fails. Where we get into trouble is if it manages to (a) crash,
(b) take an excessive amount of time to complete, or (c) screw up the
postmaster state in some way we can't recover from. But if any of
those are an issue then, yeah, just shut it off.
--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company