Re: [GENERAL] Unable to get postgres running after long time no vacuum

From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
To: "Leon Mergen" <leon(at)solatis(dot)com>
Cc: pgsql-hackers(at)postgreSQL(dot)org
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] Unable to get postgres running after long time no vacuum
Date: 2007-07-08 16:42:17
Message-ID: 1280.1183912937@sss.pgh.pa.us
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"Leon Mergen" <leon(at)solatis(dot)com> writes:
> On 7/8/07, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> It's actually not that easy to get out of the single-user mode without
>> it doing a checkpoint. I suppose you must have either SIGQUIT or
>> SIGKILL'd it. While there's nothing we can do about SIGKILL, it strikes
>> me that it might be a good safety measure if single-user mode treated
>> SIGQUIT the same as SIGTERM, ie, non-panic shutdown. Comments anyone?

> What I found with SIGTERM was that it did nothing, since it was still
> waiting for the (single-user) client to exit, and thus had no effect
> unless I sent an end-of-input ctrl+d singal, which would have resulted
> in a shutdown anyway.

We might need a bit of rejiggering around the edges of the single-user
command reading code to make this work nicely, but what I'm envisioning
is that a keyboard-generated SIGQUIT ought to result in a clean
shutdown, same as EOF does.

At least on my machine there doesn't seem to be a defined way to
generate SIGTERM from the terminal; so I can see where if someone hasn't
read the postgres man page carefully, their first instinct upon finding
that control-C doesn't get them out of single-user mode might be to type
control-\ (or whatever the local QUIT character is). It doesn't seem
like it should be quite that easy to force a panic stop.

regards, tom lane

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