Re: Archiver not exiting upon crash

I wrote:
> On my machine, man system(3) saith:

> system() ignores the SIGINT and SIGQUIT signals, and blocks the
> SIGCHLD signal, while waiting for the command to terminate. If this
> might cause the application to miss a signal that would have killed
> it, the application should examine the return value from system() and
> take whatever action is appropriate to the application if the command
> terminated due to receipt of a signal.

> Now, the code that directly calls system(), namely pgarch_archiveXlog(),
> knows this perfectly well, as per the comment at lines 590ff in HEAD.
> However, the code that *calls* it did not get the memo :-(, and appears
> to be willing to retry regardless.

Uh, no, scratch that: the code in pgarch_archiveXlog ought to be doing
ereport(FATAL) if this case applies. So it's not clear what is
happening for you, unless system() returned a misleading return code.
You might try adding a debug printout to show the actual returned value.

regards, tom lane