Re: How to shoot yourself in the foot: kill -9 postmaster

Lamar Owen <lamar(dot)owen(at)wgcr(dot)org> writes:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> If you think it's easy enough, enlighten the rest of us ;-).

> If postgres reported PGDATA on the command line it would be easy enough.

In ps status you mean? I don't think we are prepared to require ps
status functionality to let the system start up... we'd lose a number
of supported platforms that way.

>> I think refusal to start is sufficient. They should go away by
>> themselves as their clients disconnect, and forcing the issue doesn't

> ???? I have misunderstood your previous statement about not wanting to
> force a manual crash recovery, then.

In the case of an actual crash and restart, postgres should come back up
without help. However, the situation here is not a crash, it is
incomplete admin intervention. I don't think that expecting the admin
to complete his intervention is the same thing as manual crash recovery.
I especially don't think that we should second-guess what the admin
wants us to do by auto-killing backends that are still serving clients.

regards, tom lane