Re: rebooting a standby causes it go down on pgpool side

On Tue, Nov 4, 2025 at 3:32 AM Tatsuo Ishii <ishii(at)postgresql(dot)org> wrote:
>
> From the official document:
> "2 - Node is up. Connections are pooled."
> https://www.pgpool.net/docs/latest/en/html/pcp-node-info.html
>
> So you can safely assume that "waiting" also meabs node is up (for
> pgpool). To change the status from "waiting" to "up", you can issue
> any SQL command (for example show pool_nodes") to pgpool.
>

Thanks, it is clear now!

> I think what happens there is, pgpool's health check detects
> PostgreSQL on pg3 goes down and trigger failover on pg3 pgpool. As
> stated somewhere in the official docs, pgpool automatically sets
> PostgreSQL to down status, but not automatically change the status to
> up (or waiting). This is not a bug. It's by design. If you want to
> make the status to up automatically, please consider using
> auto_failback.

Thanks, I was not assuming it was a bug, only asking for confirmation
about this behavior.

>
> If you want to avoid the failover, you can tweak the health check
> parameters so that while PostgreSQL rebooting, the health check
> repeatedly retries. For example, increase health_check_max_retries.
> Note that health_check parameters can be changed by reloading
> pgpool.conf. So you can change the parameter and restore to previous
> value without rebooting pgpool.

Definetely a choice, but on the other hand increasing the number of
retries will make pgpool unable to "quickly" catch a real failover, so
I guess it is better, in my case, to deal with the "down" status after
a reboot.

Thanks,
Luca