Use a signal to trigger a memory context dump?

Hi,

I wonder if it'd make sense to allow a signal to trigger a memory
context dump? I and others more than once had the need to examine memory
usage on production systems and using gdb isn't always realistic.
I wonder if we could install a signal handler for some unused signal
(e.g. SIGPWR) to dump memory.
I'd also considered adding a SQL function that uses the SIGUSR1 signal
multiplexing for the purpose but that's not necessarily nice if you have
to investigate while SQL access isn't yet possible. There's also the
problem that not all possibly interesting processes use the sigusr1
signal multiplexing.

Greetings,

Andres Freund

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Andres Freund http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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