Re: BUG #8225: logging options don't change after reload

On Jun 13, 2013, at 4:50 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> jeff(at)pgexperts(dot)com writes:
>> What happens is that we change various logging options in postgresql.conf,
>> then reload, and every so often, the settings don't seem to take effect even
>> though they are logged as being changed.
>
> FWIW, the "parameter changed" messages are logged when the postmaster
> process updates its values of the GUCs. The particular options you're
> complaining of here, though, are not actually checked in the postmaster
> --- they're used in the checkpointer or syslogger processes
> respectively. So one theory about this would be that those processes
> aren't absorbing the GUC updates, perhaps because the SIGHUP signals the
> postmaster should be sending them are getting lost. I'm not sure how we
> might track down the cause though. How "various" are the platforms
> you're seeing this on?

I've seen it on 9.0, 9.1 and 9.2 recent versions running on Ubuntu 10.04/12.04, Centos 5/6 and Scientific Linux 6.

I've not tried on Windows.

Interestingly, it will often pick them up if you wait a few seconds and send it another reload.

I've been seeing it for a while, but haven't reported it since I couldn't come up with a reproducible test case.