Re: Server instrumentation for 8.1

Andrew - Supernews <andrew+nonews(at)supernews(dot)com> writes:
> What currently happens is that backends respond to kill -15 (_NOT_ -9)
> by cleaning up and exiting. This code path is used for implementing the
> stop -mfast option, which means that as it currently exists, the cleanup
> only has to be good enough to let other backends get out of critical
> sections and complete their own rollback-and-exit safely.

Exactly. In theory it probably works fine to allow one backend to exit
via kill -TERM, but it cannot be claimed that that behavior has been
tested to any significant extent --- "fast" shutdown is not stressing it
in the same way.

I think this is largely a question of someone doing a significant amount
of stress testing: gun live server processes with "kill -TERM" in an
active system, and keep an eye out for resource leaks, held locks, and
so on. It would be more convincing if the processes getting zapped are
executing a wide variety of SQL, too --- I'd not feel very confident
given only tests of killing, say, pgbench threads.

regards, tom lane