Re: backend hangs at immediate shutdown (Re: Back-branch update releases coming in a couple weeks)

On 1/31/13 5:42 PM, MauMau wrote:
> Thank you for sharing your experience.  So you also considered making
> postmaster SIGKILL children like me, didn't you?  I bet most of people
> who encounter this problem would feel like that.
>
> It is definitely pg_ctl who needs to be prepared, not the users.  It may
> not be easy to find out postgres processes to SIGKILL if multiple
> instances are running on the same host.  Just doing "pkill postgres"
> will unexpectedly terminate postgres of other instances.

In my case, it was one backend process segfaulting, and then some other
backend processes didn't respond to the subsequent SIGQUIT sent out by
the postmaster.  So pg_ctl didn't have any part in it.

We ended up addressing that by installing a nagios event handler that
checked for this situation and cleaned it up.

> I would like to make a patch which that changes SIGQUIT to SIGKILL when
> postmaster terminates children.  Any other better ideas?

That was my idea back then, but there were some concerns about it.

I found an old patch that I had prepared for this, which I have
attached.  YMMV.