Re: How many postmasters should be running?

On Mon, Feb 27, 2006 at 09:05:51PM -0500, Stock, Stuart wrote:
> A few minutes ago, we were surprised to find a second postmaster process
> running on our database machine as a child of the original postmaster. The
> child postmaster was around for about a minute then disappeared. This is a
> Opteron machine running RedHat AS4 with Postgres 8.1.2.
>
> Does the postmaster process ever spawn a child postmaster? Is this normal?

Each connection causes the postmaster to fork a new process to
handle that connection. When the connection ends so does that
process; that might be what you saw. For more information see the
"Monitoring Database Activity" and postmaster documentation:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/interactive/monitoring.html
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/interactive/app-postmaster.html

--
Michael Fuhr