Re: kill -KILL: What happens?

On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 8:10 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Florian Pflug <fgp(at)phlo(dot)org> writes:
>> I don't believe there's one right answer to that.
>
> Right.  Force-kill presumes there is only one right answer.
>
>> Assume postgres is driving a website, and the postmaster crashes shortly
>> after a pg_dump run started. You probably won't want your website to be
>> offline while pg_dump is finishing its backup.
>
>> If, on the other hand, your data warehousing database is running a
>> multi-hour query, you might prefer that query to finish, even at the price
>> of not being able to accept new connections.
>
>> So maybe there should be a GUC for this?
>
> No need (and rather inflexible anyway).  If you don't want an orphaned
> backend to continue, you send it SIGTERM.

It is not easy to make this work in such a way that you can ensure a
clean, automatic restart of PostgreSQL after a postmaster death.
Which is what at least some people want.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company