Re: Add Restart=on-failure To Example Systemd File

Awesome, thank you.

With regard to downstream package managers:

I previously raised an issue with pgdg yum repos which was actioned [0].
The only other package manager that I use is nixpkgs, interestingly they
set their service file's restart policy to "always"[1].

[0]: https://github.com/pgdg-packaging/pgdg-rpms/issues/127
[1]:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/e510dca493787fb7dff8ad31c1f215a0e4d7800a/nixos/modules/services/databases/postgresql.nix#L802

On Tue, Mar 3, 2026, 6:22 AM Peter Eisentraut <peter(at)eisentraut(dot)org> wrote:

> On 27.11.25 19:55, Andrew Jackson wrote:
> > Currently the systemd file in the documentation does not specify a
> > restart policy. By default systemd will not attempt to restart a
> > service that has failed (killed by OOM-killer for example) [0]. The
> > systemd docs recommends "Setting this to on-failure is the recommended
> > choice for long-running services, in order to increase reliability by
> > attempting automatic recovery from errors." I think that Postgres is
> > probably a good example of a "long-running service". Pgbouncer for
> > example also uses "Restart=on-failure" [1].
>
> Committed.
>
> I think your argument from the commit message that most users copy their
> systemd unit files from the docs is not quite correct. Most users use
> what is in packages. So perhaps you want to check the usual packagings
> and see if they are also using that setting.
>
>