Re: Server instrumentation: pg_terminate_backend, pg_reload_conf

Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Andreas Pflug wrote:
>
>>Bruce Momjian wrote:
>>
>>>Andreas Pflug wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>This patch reenables pg_terminate_backend, allowing (superuser only, of
>>>>course) to terminate a backend. As taken from the discussion some weeks
>>>>earlier, SIGTERM seems to be used quite widely, without a report of
>>>>misbehavior so while the code path is officially not too well tested,
>>>>in practice it's working ok and helpful.
>>>
>>>
>>>I thought we had a discussion that the places we accept SIGTERM might be
>>>places that can exit if the postmaster is shutting down, but might not
>>>be places we can exit if the postmaster continues running, e.g. holding
>>>locks. Have you checked all the places we honor SIGTERM to check that
>>>we are safe to exit? I know Tom had concerns about that.
>>
>>My patch is purely to enable a supervisor to issue a SIGTERM using a
>>pgsql client, instead of doing it from a server command line. It's not
>>meant to fix the underlying problems.
>
>
> We don't support sending SIGTERM from the server command line to
> individual backends, so why add support for it in SQL?

I don't want to slip into discussion whether it's good to SIGTERM a
backend or not, it is in use. So drop it if you don't like clients to
have the same facilities as console users.

BTW, I got a lot of other instrumentation stuff pending, which I
originally wanted to post one by one to allow individual discussion but
I'm running out of time for feature freeze. Apparently I'll have to post
all at once.

Regards,
Andreas