[HACKERS] Bringing down postmaster at regular intervals.

On Fri, 6 Jun 1997, Marc G. Fournier wrote:

> On Fri, 6 Jun 1997, David Friend wrote:

> > I am thinking of adding a comment in the INSTALL instructions suggesting
> > that the back end should be stopped and restarted on a regular basis as
> > part of the standard maintainence procedures.  I will also mention that
> > this will probably not be necessary once our next release comes out.
>
>     Hrmmm...what is 'regular basis'?  Once a week?  A day?  A month?
> 'regular basis', I think, is much too vague :(

Given that Tom and I both started noticing serious problems after about
4-6 runs of the regression tests, I was thinking of suggesting that an
adiministrator guestimate how long it would take his system to generate a
similar amount of traffic.  Nightly or weekly would be my suggestion.
Also suggest that it should be done whenever the system starts swapping a
lot.

The simple thing is to write a shell script that is run nightly or weekly
by cron.  The shell script could bring down the postmaster, alter the
permissions so that only the postgress account can use it, bring up
postmaster, do a backup (include something to keep the last few backups
around), then bring down the postmaster, restore the permissions to
normal, and bring it up again.

Any volunteers?  <grin>

David Friend                ! cq995@freenet.carleton.ca
Atlantis Scientific Inc.        ! david.friend@atlsci.com
20 Colonnade Rd, Suite 110        ! 613-727-1087 (voice)
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA  K2E 7M6    ! 800-265-3894 (voice)
ERGOvista Scientific Image Analysis    ! 613-727-5853 (fax)

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