hubert depesz lubaczewski <depesz(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> of course i can make myself a function which will check if pid exists, but
> it would generally be better if there was some way to fix the problem in
> postgresql itself.
Try updating to PG 8.1 ...
2005-08-09 17:14 tgl
* src/backend/postmaster/pgstat.c: Make backends that are reading
the pgstats file verify each backend PID against the PGPROC array.
Anything in the file that isn't in PGPROC gets rejected as being a
stale entry. This should solve complaints about stale entries in
pg_stat_activity after a BETERM message has been dropped due to
overload.
regards, tom lane