Re: [HACKERS] Function to kill backend

-----Original Message-----
From: pgsql-patches-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org on behalf of Magnus Hagander
Sent: Sun 7/25/2004 12:07 PM
To: Tom Lane; Bruce Momjian
Cc: Josh Berkus; PostgreSQL-patches
Subject: Re: [PATCHES] [HACKERS] Function to kill backend

> >much further. I recall being voted down though ...

> That's not quite the argument I think I had :-) But withuot being able
> to kill the backends, there just no way for me to handle the sitaution
> when I have a hundred clients eating up all available connections and/or
> memory, just sitting idle, because of some freak bug in a client.

The first time I used it was for precisely this reason - some buggy PHP code opened hundreds of connections to a dev server which then remained open doing nothing except wasting resources. It was particularly useful in that case as I didn't have access to the web server at the time.

Shortly afterwards I added support to pgAdmin's server status tool which has proven quite handy (although I will admit, mainly for canceling ather than terminating).

I don't know the details of how it works, but is it any worse/better than 'kill -9' (which iirc is no longer considered an absolute no-no)?

Regards, Dave